This Tuesday, unlike ever before, Apple made the announcement of the program line up for the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) scheduled next week. The lineup revealed that the conference will include much-anticipated cloud storage service, named iCloud, along with iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion. Further news regarding iCloud has been published by Wall Street Journal which claims that Apple’s agreements with most music labels are a success. iCloud is fundamentally going to be a digital musical locker, quite akin to its rival services like Amazon’s Cloud Player and Google Music. Whereas WSJ reports that the distinguishing feature of Apple’s service will be the benefits of getting the music labels to sign deals, as it will consequently make it easier for users to access their libraries.
Image via CrunchBase Both rival services, Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player, currently make the users manually upload any song they want in their online locker, making the task of uploading complete music libraries a very hectic and tedious job. While Amazon still lets any songs bought from online Amazon store to be added to Cloud Player library automatically, the songs and libraries before the activation of Cloud Player account still need to be uploaded one by one. Whereas, WSJ has disclosed that Apple will, due to the signings with the music labels, allow its users to simply use the “scan and match” feature. This will let the users’ iTunes library to be scanned for all song files, and the ones recognized by the music labels will be automatically given access to from the Apple’s server. This will release the task of uploading entire libraries to the servers.
The service of keeping music lockers online and the ability to stream from any device is an exceptional facility, but it is often at the expense of tediously uploading every song or album you previously downloaded to some other device. If Apple has gotten good contracts it might just be making iTunes playlists syncable directly to the cloud service. According to the latest news of Wall Street Journal, Apple’s deal with three of the four major record labels is complete, while the fourth deal with Universal Music Group is bound to be signed by this week.
If Apple successfully puts up a cloud-based iTunes experience to its users, this will definitely reward the company immensely as giving it the emerging space in the field. Apple’s iTunes remains the number one music retailer in the world, hence making it syncable with iCloud might just be the perfect jump start for the new service.
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