Technology giant, Apple have, after a long wait, launched iTunes Match. The service supplies iTunes users with music streaming and ‘cloud’ storage.
Illegal music downloading – piracy — happens everywhere, all the time. It’s just Apple decided to make money from it. The service which was launched in the UK a few days ago has been available in the US for around a month.
The concept is pretty simple; iTunes Match scans your music library on iTunes and replaces CD imported and illegally downloaded music with iTunes Store, high quality mp3’s. Obviously the illegally downloaded music part isn’t advertised; though Apple are more than aware of the reasons in which most users are subscribing to the £21.99 a year service.
Apple aren’t the only company embarking on such an idea. Google and Amazon were working, and launched very similar services a while back, much earlier this year.
There is a limit with iTunes Match of 25,000 songs.
The delay for launch in the UK was due to the lack of progress made between Apple and major record labels, Universal, EMI, Sony and Warner Music.
Those that have subscribed to iTunes Match already have been facing issues. For a short period, and possibly still, now — Apple temporarily closed subscriptions to their new launched service after the amount of features which were either inaccessible, or simply not functioning.
Users took to Twitter; most complaints due to the speed loss an iPhone would suffer by.
