Apple may be giving each of the four music labels $25-$50 million in advanced payments in order to offer music streaming for its forthcoming iCloud service.
The New York Post reports:
Apple will fork over between $100 million and $150 million in advanced payments to the four major music labels in order to get its iCloud off the ground, three separate sources told The Post. As an incentive to get on board, [Apple made payments] depending on how many tracks consumers are storing.
The size of the advance payments have been a major hold-up for Google, which had been negotiating with the music companies and now will likely have to pony up higher fees to get a rival cloud service into action, said music industry sources.
Google and Amazon decided to go on their own without the blessing of the music industry for their own cloud music players, but Apple has just changed the game. Unlike their competitors, Apple’s strategy will likely be an easier one for consumers by allowing a small music database file to be analyzed and uploaded rather than each track. This would be hassle-free for users and eliminate a massive amount of redundancies on the server side since Apple would, in theory, only have to keep one copy of each track for everyone. It would certainly be welcome news since many, including this author, have upwards of 40GB of tunes.
Steve Jobs will formally announce iCloud, along with iOS 5 and OS X Lion, at next Monday’s WWDC keynote address, 10 am Pacific time.
via New York Post
