Major Record Labels Approve iCloud

Recently, Apple has locked in all four major record labels (Warner Music, Sony, EMI, and Vivendi SA)  for their iTunes streaming service, iCloud. Based from a report from the Wall Street Journal, the deals will cover a “scan and match’ locker service” (which is similar to LaLa service Apple recently acquired). What scan and match will do is scan the library on the user’s computer and give access to the songs it recognizes without uploading the music to Apple’s servers, which is different from Amazon cloud service and Google Music. Then the user is then able to listen to their music, that was scanned and matched during initial setup on the computer, on compatible smartphones and computer, without the need of downloading the music onto the device’s storage. There has also been talks that Apple also wants to also get deeper into movies and television.

With this agreement, Apple will be able to offer an easy way for consumers to upload and listen to their entire  music collections online without the tedious work of manually uploading the music. It has been said that the iCloud service would be more robust than Google Music service and Amazon’s Cloud services.

This comes in just about a week before Apple’s annual WWDC (Apple World Wide Developers Conference). With their recent massive data server, it became known that Apple was planning on a streaming service. It shifted from if Apple will start a streaming service to when the service will be relieved.

Although Apple is about to unveil the service, they are not the first one to do so. Although services  like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Services had been deployed into the wild a while ago, if Apple is able to hold the licences between the record labels, they will have a tighter hold on its users, making Amazon and Google harder to attract users to their services.