The recently announced iTunes Match is being hailed as a clever way to make money off of music pirates (or by some accounts legitimize music piracy). That's all well and good, but as the drummer for a DIY band I'm more concerned about how Apple's new cloud service will impact my band's bottom line.
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First thing's first though, what exactly is iTunes Match?
- All songs purchased through iTunes Music Store can now be easily downloaded or redownloaded to all your devices. (This feature is free and available today. You can play around with it on your iPhone/iPad if you have one.)
- Some time this fall iTunes Match will launch for $25/year.
- iTunes will scan your Music Library.
- Any songs it finds which are also availble for sale in iTunes Music Store will be available to download on all devices as if you bought them from iTunes.
- Songs which are not for sale in the iTunes Music Store will be uploaded to Apple's cloud servers. Once uploaded you'll be able to download on all devices as if you bought them from iTunes.
- iTunes Match will only work for up to 25,000 songs (not including tracks you legitimately purchased from iTunes Music Store)
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It's really important to note that Apple decided NOT to stream any tracks.
You need to download the song before you can start listening. They probably did that so they can avoid paying on-demand streaming royalties to record labels each time a song is played. As a result I'm betting that artists will be paid a very small royalty when their song is matched and made available for download.
By very small I mean around $0.001 per matched song which is what you get when you take the $25.00 the service costs divided by the 25,000 songs iTunes Match allows*.
To put some of this into context take Lady Gaga's recent #1 album Born This Way. It sold 1.1 million copies in its first week. Lets double that number to account for some piracy bringing us to 2.2 million. Imagine that all of the folks who bought or pirated that album sign up for iTunes Match. The 14 tracks on the album times 2.2 million copies paying $0.001 per song would bring Lady Gaga a grand total of $30,800. That won't even buy a good meat dress in this economy.
If a #1 record can barely make $30,000 from iTunes Match I'm not really holding out much hope that my band will be rolling in royalites. However, I really don't care.
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iTunes Match seems like a great deal for music fans and if the fans are happy I can figure out a way to turn that happiness into finacial support. It just takes a bit more creativity.
Lou
Product Manager at Sonicbids, @LouPaniccia on Twitter and drummer for Oranjuly.
* UPDATE: Digital Music News did some investigating and published more accurate iTunes Match royalty numbers. Check them out here.
