Apple paying up to $150 million to music labels

Apple yesterday signed the last of four deals with the four major music labels. With Universal Music now on board, Apple will be able to launch its iCloud streaming and storage service, which will be announced at Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. Reports are coming out today that Apple has paid these labels a pretty good amount to make up for it for their permissions to access their content in the cloud.

The New York Post is reporting that Apple is paying between $100 million to $150 million upfront to the labels, totaling $25 million to $50 million per label. According to Business Insider, "Apple has $66 billion in cash and long-term and short-term securities." So, deep down, spending up to $150 million to avoid any future lawsuits from these music labels is as a matter of fact not a big deal for Apple.

Though nothing has been officially announced about iCloud but, we've heard that users won't to tell the truth have to upload each song individually, which could take a lot of time and energy for those of us with larger music libraries. Instead, Apple will be able to simply scan your computer and upload your music to the cloud.

As we reported yesterday, Apple will offer the service for free at first, nevertheless may be charging a $25 yearly fee to use the service — even though we're not sure if that will change depending on how much content you're storing. Amazon's cloud service, for instance, starts you with 5GB of storage for free, which is about 1,000 songs, or 20 minutes of HD video. The pricing goes up incrementally from there: 20GB for $20 a year, 50 GB for $50 a year, etc.

Apple is said to be taking 30 percent of iCloud revenue, whereas the labels will be getting 58 percent. The New York Post said Apple has finalized deals with the necessary music publishers, who will be getting 12 percent of the revenue.

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