Apple’s yet to be disclosed iCloud Music Player has witnessed a lot of chatter over the last several months and now rumors are beginning to circulate that the service will sync with users own current iTunes library’s, allowing them to listen to their music from a myriad of devices.
Businessweek has learned that the program will scan a customers iTunes libraries and then find “high quality” versino of their songs, mirroring them onto the users iCloud space. If this news is correct it will mean no uploading required and therefore less bandwidth used.
Under terms of the service “low quality” bitrate tracks will automatically be replaced by “fully licensed” and “high-quality” versions of the users musc.
In order to use the service users will more than likely pay a subscription fee similar to MobileMe’s $99 per year price tag. With that price tag users are also expected to receive synching for bookmarks, contacts, email and calendar.
The subscription based and the ability to stream songs you may not have purchased would be a great sign from record labels who will finally be able to profit from pirated songs.
If rumors of how the program will operate are correct the program could deal quite the blow to Amazon and Google who both recently launched their own programs. Google has yet to license music from major labels and Amazon ran into issues when they sold the entire Lady Gaga “Born This Way” album for $.99 and couldn’t keep up with server demand.
We’ll know more by June 6 when WWDC kicks off.
