iTUNES MATCH GOES LIVE

The holy grail of music listening is almost here: soon enough we’ll be able to listen to all of our music from the cloud, anywhere, any time. We’re not quite there yet; I give it five years before full-scale cloud penetration really takes hold. But with today’s news that Apple’s iTunes Match has finally gone live we’re one step closer.

Quick recap: iTunes Match is a service that dovetails with Apple’s new iCloud service. In a nutshell, it scans your iTunes library for all music files (even ones you downloaded from other services, torrents, .rar blogs, or files you’ve ripped in shitty quality). Without you having to upload any files, iTunes Match then grants you access to ALL of those songs in 256kbps quality, directly accessible on Apple’s servers from any computer (Mac or PC), iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. iTunes Match won’t work for music that isn’t available on iTunes so it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s still pretty dern cool and I’m frankly quite surprised that record labels haven’t tried to sue this thing into oblivion. The service costs $25/year.

Future, nice to meet you. This is gonna be fun. If Apple ever launches a Spotify-like all-you-can-eat streaming service it’s all over.

-VN