Itunes Match service seems mind blowing. "Even 20,000 songs" will cost only $24.99 per year it seems.
2. Apple doesn't live in a vacuum and isn't stupid, they know they're effectively offering amnesty to pirates. Their bet is that they win by bringing people into their ecosystem, that $25 and a shot at future purchases is a better deal than the nothing they're currently getting from pirates.
This announcement seems great. I will get way more than $25/yr value out of having reliable access to all this music again.
I am not hung up on "how often" I've paid for this music. I bought the CDs; if I wanted to, I could have archived them as carefully as Rob from High Fidelity. I have better things to do with my life. The $25 convenience fee here is buying me a lot of convenience.
If I didn't want the convenience, I wouldn't have to pay for it. I could just rerip. Let me work out my hourly rate and see what kind of return I'm getting for nevermind I'm just going to pay Apple.
This is for people with existing collections of questionable legality or other provenance, who otherwise wouldn't join the service if it meant they had to give all that music up.
That's easy: iTunes is already the biggest music retailer, and there's ten billion plus tracks out there that don't need iTunes Match at all.
If I have to pay...
You don't. The $25/yr. is for an entirely optional service that you have not previously paid for.
this is actually encouraging me to go illegally download music
Nonsense. You're complaining that the service is only giving you the ability to do something you can (supposedly) already do, yes? Something you already (supposedly) paid for: what you call "access". But if you pirate, the same thing is true. If all you want to do is have "access" to the music, you already could have gotten that by pirating. iTunes Match doesn't change that at all.
Both schemes have their pros and cons. The comparison of upload time during the keynote was a complete joke to anyone that knows anything about this sort of technology though: saying how much faster the upload on your service is that doesn't upload to begin with to services that do is just silly.
No, believe me, it's not. I'm using the Google Music beta, and by my calculations, it will take multiple weeks to upload my collection.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=80+GB%2F10KBps
I know I don't have the best internet connection, nor do I have the smallest music collection, but that's a whole lot of time to be uploading at full speed (which makes my internet unusable).
Over the last few days I have read so many comments on HN confidently proclaiming that the music labels would never ever ever do something like this.
There's a limit of 25k songs, and Apple doesn't say if the music disappears if contract ends.