Ok, so the tech blogosphere has been bugging me the past 24 hours as they rejoiced over a video of streaming songs with iTunes Match. Then when an Apple spokesperson made a statement saying iTunes Match doesn't support streaming, everyone went crazy wondering why Apple would do this.First, they blamed the music industry, but All Things D talked to a record exec who claimed Apple had already got a license to stream. With no legal reason to block streaming, bloggers then assumed that Apple was streaming songs in a way that's technically superior to everyone else. For example, All Things D concluded that "One way to think about this system might be 'streaming plus.' That is – you get the instant access to your music via the cloud, with the ability to play it back on demand as well." But that doesn't feel right to me either. If you don't have good data connection you can't stream or download regardless of the tech behind it. I don't see an advantage to Apple's system over Spotify which lets you both stream and download or Google Music which automatically saves recently played songs locally.
Personally, it looks to me like Apple left streaming out of iTunes Match so they wouldn't cannibalize hardware sales for iPhones and iPads with more storage. Right now an iPhone 4 costs $199 with 16GB of storage and $299 with 32GB. Buying the 32GB iPhone gets Apple more revenue and I'd bet that the higher capacity devices are more profitable as well. Forcing iTunes Match users to download all songs to their device gives Apple a reason to sell you a device with more storage.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents on a story that's been frustrating me. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Lou
Follow @LouPaniccia
