Apple's 'iTunes Match': It's No Turkey!

Last week Apple took another giant leap forward in the realm of digital music distribution. The innovators behind the iPod, iPhone, and iPad have already made a significant contribution to shaping the way people get their music thanks to iTunes, their online music store selling individual tracks at discounted prices, and full albums from as low as $7.99. Now with "iTunes Match" Apple has once again changed the game.

Music lovers have vast catalogs of work from everyone from Devo to The Beatles, both on CD format and in the form of digital computer files. What iTunes Match allows its users to do is to create a virtual catalog of all the music in their iTunes libraries, and it will be "matched" against Apple's own server content. If your digital file has a match on their servers, it's yours to download with great audio quality for free, as long as you are subscribing to the service.

While some might fear that this new service could benefit those with pirated copies of music, it should be noted that paying $25 a year for iTunes match will at least pay for the licensing costs for the new, clean copies of the songs, so at least in theory artists will at least see some revenue generated from this new service rather than nothing, and those new and clean copies provide one big benefit for those of us who may have massive CD catalogs.

There's nothing worse than dragging out an old copy of a beloved CD, putting it in your player and hearing years of neglect and abuse come through in the form of skips, trips and pops thanks to a scratched disc. With iTunes match, those scratched CDs can came alive again! Simply ripping them into the iTunes library and syncing the songs with iTunes Match will exchange your scratched and skipping tracks for new, clean versions. Given that you can download and then burn those tracks to CDs for your listening pleasure since all iTunes Match tracks are DRM (Digital Rights Management) free.

The fact that iTunes Match music can be pulled down to any device also makes this quite an attractive option for people's whose music libraries are quite large, but they don't want to take up valuable data storage space with every rare b-side and one off. Now you can download what you want when you want, and then remove it later. You can of course also stream the songs as well, but it may be best to do that over a good Wi-Fi connection as 3G network speeds and bandwidth could cause playing delays and skips.