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Digital Top Stories
Apple renegotiating iTunes licences to create sort of locker
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 7 March 2011
So, there was more speculation last week about Apple’s long-awaited ‘cloud’ based music service after Bloomberg reported the IT giant is busy trying to renegotiate its licenses with the major record companies.
As previously reported, it’s long been assumed Apple is considering an alternative music service to run alongside its successful iTunes download store. Some have speculated Apple is planning a Spotify-style streaming platform, though such a venture would almost certainly require the IT firm to invest heavily into what would likely be a loss-making service at launch, and Apple doesn’t like losing money on content.
Therefore it seems more likely Apple, like its now arch rivals Google, is considering playing in the ‘digital locker’ space, providing a cloud-based file storage service specifically designed for music, from which MP3s already owned by users could be re-downloaded or streamed from any net connected device.
And Bloomberg’s report confirms this suspicion. The website claims that Apple is trying to get the majors to agree to new licensing terms in which customers, once they have paid 79p for a track, can re-download or stream it from Apple’s servers as many times as they like.
This would provide customers with a handy back-up service, so when, say, a publisher’s Mac gets knocked on the floor shortly after arriving at his temporary office at the Edinburgh Festival (I’m over that now, really) killing the hard disk and the MP3 collection on it, any tracks previously bought from iTunes could be redownloaded at no extra cost and at the click of a button.
But the new licenses, if Apple could get them, would also rather cleverly turn iTunes into a kind of digital locker service; ‘cleverly’ because the labels are currently resistant to licensing full-blown digital locker set ups, but might be persuaded to agree to the redownload system.
The downside of the new service, if it was as Bloomberg describes, is that the locker would only store tracks bought from iTunes, whereas other digital lockers will let you upload your entire MP3 collections oblivious of origin.
Though while in theory a weakness, that limitation will make the whole thing more palatable to digital-locker-phobic major labels, while also locking iTunes customers even more to the Apple store, which fits in nicely with the IT firm’s ambitions of total market control.
