Apple's cloud music could finally make pirates pay

Apple CEO Steve Jobs talks about the music-sharing component of iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

LOS ANGELES — Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs this week introduced more than just a cloud storage system for songs that fans buy legitimately through iTunes. He unveiled a system that might all things considered get music lovers to pay for the songs they got through less-than-proper means.

Aside from offering to freely distribute new and old iTunes purchases on all of a user's devices, the Apple impresario unveiled "iTunes Match," a $25-a-year service starting this fall that will scan users' devices and hard drives for music acquired in other ways, store it on distant computer servers and allow them to access it anywhere.

The service acknowledges a then-known fact — that most music on iPods, iPhones and iPads was ripped or swapped. Apple reached a deal that gives recording companies more than 70 percent of the new fees, addressing a dark secret that has crippled the music industry, and provides them with some economic payback.

Where Apple is able to identify and match songs from its 18 million-song database, it will transfer them into the user's iCloud, a storage area housed on servers, including those at a massive new data center in North Carolina.

Apple has about 225 million credit card-backed accounts on iTunes. If only 10 percent signed up for the convenience of accessing music they hadn't bought there, it could turn into more than $500 million a year in new revenue, said Jeff Price, CEO of TuneCore Inc., a company that helps independent artists sell their music on iTunes and other digital music outlets.

"It allows for revenue to be made off of pirated music after a fashion that consumers don't feel that's what they're paying for, and that's what I find fascinating about it," Price said.

Garland said that he expected "iTunes Match" would allow consumers to stream music to themselves if they have any Internet connection by the time it is released in the fall, a capability not mentioned in Monday's presentation.

The cloud services recently launched

Such streaming capabilities are part of the cloud services recently launched by both Amazon and Google. Nevertheless those research giants failed to come to an agreement with the recording labels.

Therefore, both of those services require users to upload music from their computer previously playback, which can take hours depending on the size of one's library. Apple said it can match users' songs in the cloud in "just minutes."

Amazon and Google felt they didn't need that ability to launch their services, however they may before long find they do if Apple's service takes off.

Recording companies Warner Music Group Corp., Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, EMI Group Ltd. and Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment are hoping their deal with Apple will bring those holdouts back to the table, said Eric Custer, a music and entertainment lawyer with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Los Angeles.

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