iCloud rumoured to be released next month

[HunkyLuke]

BusinessWeek reported that Apple is looking to announce their iCloud service at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference next month. The report says that Apple has an agreement with 3 of the big 4 music companies and is close to reaching an agreement with the forth.

Apple's music service, which Engadget and other tech blogs are already calling iCloud, might well represent the future of recorded music. Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers' digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user's hard drive isn't good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars. And the music industry gets a chance at the next best thing after selling shrink-wrapped CDs: monthly subscription fees

This will vault Apple well ahead of its new rivals, Amazon's Cloud Player, Google's Music Beta and the mSpot / Pandora deal announced last week.

The music industry is changing, and its leading how digital media is distributed. Wonder if we should be looking at this as an example of what we should be doing too!

[x0pa]

cant wait to see what they are coming up with, but im more excited about lion and ios5!!!

[zbuckz_lloyd]

Apple also filed a patent to have part of the song on the device for instant playback while it starts the stream for the rest of the song.

Another thing to consider is that Apple is also using the master copy for songs not bought on Itunes. So, this will allow music companies to get a piece of the action on songs that were not bought but downloaded.