Apple Launches iCloud

So Apple’s iCloud was launched yesterday (June 6) and you can be sure that there will be dozens of thinkpieces all over the Internet on what this means for the music industry. The iCloud is free—you’ll get 5GB of space in which you can upload anything you want, but there’s also a deal specifically targeted at iTunes users.

For $25 per year iTunes will scan your music library and allow you to access copies of all those songs from their cloud. In other words, you’ll be able to stream them on a mobile device without needing to cart round thousands of MP3 files. The only snag? Well, iTunes may not have every song you own, but that may be a small price to pay for such an affordable service.

The best part of this deal is that the songs that iTunes matches in its cloud doesn’t count against your 5 GB iCloud limit, meaning that music obsessives won’t quickly fill it up if they go with Apple’s new service. The iTunes cloud songs will all be encoded at 256 kbps, which may be an upgrade in quality for some users. Gizmodo claims this will all work just fine even if you’ve been heavily downloading pirated music online. With that in mind, the RIAA statement on all this should be well worth waiting for.