The cloud music service Apple is widely believed to unveil at WWDC next month may have an important feature that the competition lacks. Instead of forcing users to upload their entire multi-gigabyte music collections, Apple's "iCloud" service will automatically add tracks that are in Apple's extensive iTunes Store library.
According to sources speaking to Business Week, Apple's service will "scan customers' digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers." Tracks not available via the iTunes Store would still need to be uploaded, but the feature would significantly reduce the amount of data that would need to be uploaded for the average user.
A side benefit of the feature is that users will be able to stream iTunes Plus versions of the songs, even if the user originally encoded the tracks as lower quality AAC or MP3 files. Such a feature was also a benefit of Lala, the streaming music service Apple bought in late 2009.
The high-bitrate streaming would be the fruit of Apple's efforts to reach licensing deals with record labels. The company is believed to have already signed deals with EMI, Warner Music, and Sony, leaving Universal as the lone holdout among the big four. There hasn't been any word on Apple attempting to reach deals with independent record labels, though it seems likely they would sign on to Apple's service once launched.
The automatic track mirroring is in sharp contrast to Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google's Music Beta digital lockers. Those services simply provide storage for users to upload their music files, with Web-based and mobile streaming players. Amazon and Google launched their services without the blessing of music labels, which believe both companies should pay license fees.
Business Week noted that Google tried for a year to set up a cloud music service that included licensed sales and other features, but launched its unlicensed Music Beta when talks broke down over the fact that Google searches link to pirated music. Amazon reportedly launched its service without seeking licensing at all, arguing that all the music belongs to users, and that Amazon simply provides a cloud-based storage service.
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