Apple now joins Amazon and Google in the cloud wars.
With Apple’s iCloud, the music you purchase in iTunes appears automatically on all your devices. You can also download your past iTunes purchases. Where you want, when you want.
New purchases. Automatically everywhere. iCloud automatically downloads any new music purchase to all your devices over Wi-Fi — or over 3G if you choose. Which means you can buy a song from iTunes on your iPad at home, and find it waiting for you on your iPhone during your morning commute. All without having to sync.
iCloud stores all the music in the cloud (not too hard to figure out from the name).
Then, your music is pushed to your devices: your music automatically appears on your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC.
Your past purchases. Available on all your devices. Now you can download music you’ve previously purchased to all your devices. When you buy music from iTunes, iCloud stores your purchase history. So you can see the music you’ve bought — no matter which device you bought it on. You can access your purchase history from the iTunes Store on your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. And since you already own that music, you can tap to download your songs or albums to any of your devices.1
Purchased list: see your entire iTunes music purchase history.
Download button: If some of your music isn’t on one of your devices, just tap to download it.
Coming This Fall: iTunes Match
If you want all the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. For just $24.99 a year.
Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.
18 million songs for matching. iCloud scans and matches your music with the 18 million songs in iTunes. So chances are your music is already in iCloud.
Listen at 256 Kbps. Play back matched songs at iTunes Plus quality. Even if your original copy was of lower quality.
There’s iCloud. And then there’s everything else. If music is your thing and you have the collection to prove it, iCloud with iTunes Match is the easiest, most affordable way to store and access all your music.
Pricing Analysis
Annual price for 5,000 songs: Apple ($24.99), Amazon ($50.00), Google Music beta ($???)
Annual price for 20,000 songs: Apple ($24.99), Amazon ($200.00), Google Music beta ($???)
