David Emery OnlineGoogle And Amazon May Have Just Handed Apple The Keys To The Cloud Music Kingdom
19 May 2011
So the labels, which for the better part of a decade now have been looking for someone, anyone to help counter Apple’s power in their business, is turning right back to Apple when they need help. And Apple will obviously gladly welcome them with open arms. After all, with these licenses, Apple will have secured the cloud music high ground despite being the last to launch.
My prediction (based on no insider knowledge): Apple will launch their cloud service in September which quickly becomes the market leader – due to the fact you won’t have to spend 3 days over ADSL uploading your music library to it – even though it’s more expensive then Amazon and Google. Amazon and Google will then scrabble around and get licenses from the labels but by that point Apple’s service will be entrenched, in much the same way the iTunes Store is.
Apple wins again, and the labels still don’t have a decent digital competitor for iTunes.
I love the fact that for years I’ve been hearing things like “we shouldn’t have let Apple come in and take over digital music retailing, we should have built our own store first” yet the exact same mistakes are being made again with cloud music. And it’s not as though this kind of venture is beyond the major labels – look at Vevo, which is a pretty good stab at this kind of thing but for music videos.
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