Music: Bridging the piracy gap: Apple’s iCloud cleverly inverts Napster 1.0
- We totally have to give Apple credit: The conceit around the iTunes portion of the iCloud service, while not exactly what we expected (it’s not Lala 2.0, sadly), manages to pull off an interesting trick — it creates a revenue model from a place where only piracy existed before. By upgrading your music’s quality and making it easily accessible from the cloud, it adds value inexpensively, and gets around a major sticking point for the major labels cleverly. And music industry officials see it as a positive. “It allows for revenue to be made off of pirated music in a way that consumers don’t feel that’s what they’re paying for, and that’s what I find fascinating about it,” noted Jeff Price, the CEO of TuneCore Inc., which helps independent artists sell their music online. Our music anywhere for $25 a year? Sure, we’ll pay that. source