Apple may unveil ‘digital lockers’ for tunes

Compared with buying e-books, building a digital music collection is a hassle. E-books zip directly to reading devices like the Kindle and Nook and are backed up “in the cloud” — on the servers of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. A digital song, on the other hand, is typically downloaded to a PC and must then be manually transferred to an iPod or mobile phone. If you lose your Kindle, you can always download an e-book again; if the PC crashes or the iPod falls into the bathtub, the song goes down with it.
Moving music to the cloud has been an elusive goal for big tech companies and their music industry counterparts, until now.
In the past two months, Amazon and Google have unveiled cloud music services, albeit to mixed reviews and indifference from consumers. These new services let users upload their music collections into so-called digital lockers on the Internet and stream the songs they own to a variety of devices. Both are limited, because neither Google nor Amazon could reach an accommodation with music labels. Label executives say they are negotiating aggressively to make sure they profit from the shift to the cloud. It may be the last opportunity to stem rampant piracy and years of plummeting sales.
Apple, the reigning heavyweight of the music business, may have solved this cloud conundrum. It has reached agreements with three of the four major music labels and is close to reaching terms with the fourth, Universal Music, according to people with knowledge of these deals.
The company could preview its cloud plans as early as June at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The music industry will be watching to see whether Steve Jobs & Co. have discovered a way to quell the deep anxieties of the music biz while creating a flexible, easy-to-use service that isn’t too expensive.
“With a big enough checkbook, anyone can get a deal with the record labels,” says Michael Robertson, founder of an unlicensed cloud music locker called Mp3tunes, which is embroiled in a lawsuit with EMI. “The question is whether Apple’s cloud music service will be consumer-friendly.”
Apple declined to comment.
Apple’s music service, which Engadget and other tech blogs are already calling iCloud, might well represent the future of recorded music. Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers’ digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. Users of the service will then be able to stream their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars. And the music industry gets a chance at the next best thing after selling CDs: monthly subscription fees.
“We will come to a point in the not-so-distant future when we’ll look back on the 99-cent download as anachronistic as cassette tapes or 8-tracks,” says Ross Crupnick, a music analyst at NPD Group.
While it may be a huge shift, it won’t be free. Apple no doubt has paid dearly for any cloud music licenses, and it’s unclear how much of those costs it will eat or pass on to consumers.