Noises Off

Today's keynote address at Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference featured plenty of new goodies to excite Mac, iPad and iPhone users.

But there was one feature in Apple's new iCloud development that was unspoken: Apple have found a way for the record companies and music publishers (and Apple themselves) to make money from pirated music.

iTunes In The Cloud is one of the new features outlined today. It means that any music you've purchased from iTunes will be available to all of your Apple iOS and Mac devices at any time. But iTunes purchases are just a tiny (or non-existent) portion of most iTunes libraries.

Which brings us to iTunes Match. It will match your collection of songs in your iTunes collection with songs in the online iTunes Library, and enable this to be available to you wherever you want on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. This costs US$24.99 per year.



It doesn't matter if your local iTunes music is from your own CDs, CDs borrowed from your friends and ripped to your own computer or music downloaded (pirated) from the internet. Whether it's legitimedtly purchased music or illegal downloads. It's available through iTunes Match.

The information I've seen suggests the split is 60% to the record companies, 10% to music publishers and 30% to Apple.

So there you have it. Someone has finally found a way for the record companies (and Apple) to make some money from pirated music.