Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Apple Finally Showed The Record Labels How To Make Money From Stolen Music

paidContent reporting:
Apple made a lot of small announcements at WWDC yesterday, but one has the potential to quietly change an industry.
iTunes Match will scan users' iTunes libraries, then find matches in the songs that Apple has for sale in the iTunes Store. Then, it will let users download those songs to any iOS device or computer running iTunes. The price is $25 per year.
For songs that iTunes can't recognize, users can still upload them to their personal iCloud service, which is free up to 5GB. Then they can get the files directly from iCloud to their other devices.
The key point: it doesn't matter where the song originally came from.
...

As CEO Jeff Price of Tunecore points out, Apple is paying royalties to record labels and publishers to cover this user behavior.
Amazon and Google introduced music lockers -- a similar concept, but they require users to upload every song manually -- but they're not paying the industry a dime.
In other words, Apple just built the service that lets the record industry FINALLY make money from pirated music.
This is something the record industry should have done itself 10 years ago when Napster emerged, instead of suing its customers to try and stop them from sharing music, it should have figured out how to make money off them.
It took Apple to show the labels that digital music downloads could be a good business. Now, it's going to take Apple to show them how to make money from digital files that users never paid for.
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-finally-showed-the-labels-how-to-make-money-from-stolen-content-2011-6?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=SAI%20Select&utm_campaign=SAI_Select_060811

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