Apple iCLOUD Shakes Up Music Delivery

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At Apple's WWDC, Steve Jobs came on stage to announce iCloud, an Apple service that stores your music, and content and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices — automatically. Users can put all the songs they have ever bought from the company's iTunes store on up to 10 devices at no additional charge.

Steve Jobs and iCloud

Apple says it will do the same with books and apps previously purchased through its online stores.

Future iTunes purchases can be automatically sent to all the devices. Content transfers will NOT require devices to be plugged into a computer (only a wireless connection).

To do this deal, with Amazon and Google trying to wrestle away music from Apple's control with iTunes, Apple struck licensing agreements with all the major recording labels on this new cloud music-synching system. The "big four" music labels were paid at least $100 million, according to a report in the NY Post, with tens of millions of dollars offered to smaller labels.

Even though Apple's iCloud won't launch until autumn, iPhone and iPad users with the latest version of iOS, version 4.3, can try it out in beta right now. The beta version of iCloud is already built in their App Store and iTunes Store apps. For example: If you download an app for your iPad, you can download it to your iPhone from iCloud without having to sync to your computer. Same goes with music.

Go Apple's iCloud