Apple inks deal with Sony music for iTunes cloud service; Universal music close to deal

15 years ago

“Apple Inc. has reached agreements with three major record labels to let users of its new music service access their song collections from handheld devices via the Internet, people with knowledge of the deals said,” Andy Fixmer and Adam Satariano report for Bloomberg.

“Apple, the largest U.S. music retailer, follows Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. in letting consumers stream music from the so-called cloud instead of downloading it to a hard drive,” Fixmer and Satariano report. “Unlike competing products, Apple’s cloud music service won’t require users to upload online collections, two people said.”

Fixmer and Satariano report, “Apple has reached licensing accords with Sony Corp. (6758)’s music division, EMI Group and Warner Music Group, the people said. Universal Music Group, the largest recording company, is close to a deal, another person said. Whether Apple will charge a fee for the cloud service and when it will become widely available to the public aren’t yet known. The music plans may be part of a broader overhaul of Apple’s MobileMe platform to let users store pictures, contacts and other files on Apple’s servers and access them from the Web, two of the people said.”

“Licenses with the music labels may help Apple make its services more efficient by eliminating the need to store separate copies of a song for each customer,” Fixmer and Satariano report. “Instead, multiple users could stream tracks from the same copy housed on the company’s server… Apple will accommodate the data and networking demands of its planned cloud services with a new $1 billion data center in North Carolina. Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in February that the facility will be a hub for the iTunes and MobileMe services.”