Great news, Guys! Apple is about to once again completely devalue your entire conception of what it means to be a ‘music collector’ by making access to your collection mind-numbingly ubiquitous and paralyzingly convenient! Woo hoo! I don’t know about you, but personally, I can’t wait to never bother listening to any records because I always have the option to do so.
Anyway, as Billboard reports (and as everyone everywhere pretty much expected), Apple has thoroughly made Amazon and Google feel totally ‘salty’ by signing that elusive fourth major label — Universal Music Group — to a licensing deal for its game-shifting, paradigm-changing, “iCloud” music service, which will supposedly be announced on Monday June 6 at its Worldwide Developer Conference (whoa, give it up to TMT for bringing you FUTURENEWS). You may recall from reading our site all day every day that no one else has been able to get Universal to play ball up until now, which, as comedian/Jewish guy Jerry Seinfeld will tell you, has lead to some pretty big matzo balls hanging out from the other guys’ cloud services.
Oh. Also, Apple has scored licensing deals with the four major music publishers in the biz, which is another huge piece in the cloud puzzle. Specifically, the publishers will get 12% of the cloud revenue, while the majors will allegedly receive 58%, leaving little old Apple with a nice round 30%. They haven’t yet struck deals with all the little guys (indie labels and publishers), but Billboard’s sources are saying that the indie publishers will be cut in at the same 12% rate. For their part, some of the indie labels are saying that they’re pushing for a higher cut, but we all know that’s nonsense. It’s ‘join or die’ time. For you? It’ll reportedly cost $25.
And in case you’re wondering “what’s gonna be so much slicker about Apple’s cloud anyway?” The answer is that, in addition to having everyone’s full legal permission, it’s supposed have the insanely convenient feature of syncing automatically with iTunes and your iTunes folder (and perhaps even more FAR OUT places in the future). In other words, whatever’s in your library on your home computer will be in your library anywhere on Earth. Heck, even in a real library! Isn’t that just disgusting? And don’t you just want it so bad??
• Apple: http://www.apple.com
• Lucky owner of the icloud.com domain: http://www.cloudme.com
