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Comment by andrewcross | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how a Cloud music service would work for non-iTunes bought music? While I would never pirate music cough, I'm wondering whether music obtained in such a manner would be available in the cloud. I can see three different ways the iCloud could work:

1) The only music available via the cloud are songs you've purchased. You have to sign in to get access to the music and only songs purchased with the account are available. Possible, but I doubt anyone would really use it if this was the case. 2) You are able to upload any music that you haven't purchased and add it to your cloud account. I think this is most likely but doesn't really differentiate it from current competitors. 3) Any music that you have in your itunes is instantly available online. I highly doubt this will be the case.

Anyone else have any thoughts on how it would work? Would you use it if you can't get pirated music on the cloud?

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Option 3 is pretty much exactly what the most recent rumors suggested: "Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers' digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user's hard drive isn't good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars." [1]

[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/26/some-icloud-music-servic...

Very interesting. If Apple is able to pull this off I'll be very impressed, but I can't see how the record labels will go for this.

The record labels are happy to get paid N times for each song that they sell.

"We've scanned your iTunes library of 12,000 songs. The price to stream each song over iCloud will be $0.09/song. Click here to bill the $1,080 directly to your card."

If that's not the scenario, than what is? You can only stream songs newly purchased over iTunes and only iTunes?

I suspect Apple will charge a flat rate for iCloud and allocate the royalties proportionally (like Spotify). From the customer's point of view it will be "free" to sync their music into iCloud, but the labels will get paid (again).

> I suspect Apple will charge a flat rate for iCloud and allocate the royalties proportionally (like Spotify). From the customer's point of view it will be "free" to sync their music into iCloud, but the labels will get paid (again).

This is how I see it too. Customers with smaller collections (i.e. the majority) will have higher margins, and effectively subsidise those with larger (and therefore with larger royalty payouts) collections.

Works similarly to the way ISP's do: users who use say, 20GB of a 60GB cap are more profitable than a user who uses 145GB of a 150GB. Bandwidth costs are small, but on a large scale, it works.

I would guess the latter. Possibly they swallow the cost of letting you stream your existing collection for free, but that seems unlikely.

But that kind of negates the whole attractive sales point of "your whole music collection INSTANTLY ONLINE!"

I think wmf might be onto it. It could be a subscription thing. But as someone highly rated noted above, this whole iCloud thing might just be the developer's platform at this point in time (it is WWDC, after all), and the music stuff comes later in the fall with the iPod cycle.

By excluding pirated music, they'd also be excluding people who bought music legally on CD or via another music service like Amazon, or music that is released under a free to trade license, like the stuff on archive.org and etree.org.

Amazon, archive and etree are very marginal groups, but I can't imagine they'd lock out everyone's old CD purchases.

If you couldn't upload your own music files, and thus only play tracks you've purchased, then this isn't much of a cloud "music locker" at all. It's essentially just letting you play/stream the music you own from multiple devices (where currently you can only download the music file once). Of course, that's not to say this isn't what iCloud will be, but I'd be a little disappointed if it were the case.

I'd make great use of it if I could upload my own files, and probably not otherwise.

Also I'd just like to toss in it wouldn't shock me if this were "US Only" at least initially.

I could make a case for all three, but ultimately I think #3 is most likely, given that Lala did it.

The key: Lala’s song-identification-and-upload technologies (also discontinued as of today) allowed users to mirror their local music -- including an iTunes library -- onto cloud-based Lala accounts. -- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/apple-kills-lala-musi...

There's two scenarios but both have their problems

1) only works with music purchased from iTunes. Not much use

2) works with all music. how does Apple verify that you actually own the music (and if they've got a licensing deal with the record labels they'll need to keep them happy)

The way to solve both problems is to offer a subscription service like Microsoft's Zune Pass. Pay a monthly fee and stream any music you like.

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