How Steve Jobs Just Monetized Pirated Music
No wonder Steve Jobs is smiling. He just struck a deal with the record labels to finally monetize pirated music — a move that “resets the whole music industry,” according to one music-tech CEO.
The new scan-and-match feature in iTunes — called iTunes Match — will put a copy of most songs in users’ libraries in the cloud, where they will be available for streaming to any device for $25 a year. It doesn’t matter where those songs came from — whether they were purchased on iTunes, ripped from a CD or downloaded from a file-sharing network.
“This puts together a model that allows people to make money off of pirated music,” Jeff Price, founder and CEO of independent music distributor TuneCore told Mashable. The service will likely be launched on Monday — and from then on, most of the music in user’s iTunes libraries will be synced automatically with the 18 million tracks Apple has on file.
