Apple’s iCloud may be free for iTunes customers during intro period, then $25 per year

By on Jun 3, 2011 at 8:00 AM
General June 3, 2011

Apple will offer paying iTunes customers a free introductory offer that makes its new iCloud service free for a limited time, Los Angeles Times reports. Apple will then begin charging about $25 per year for the service, the report claims, and it will also serve advertisements to iCloud users. Apple is said to have signed deals with each of the four major U.S. music labels as well as some larger music publishers, which will reportedly allow the company to store music on cloud servers and stream songs to customers who have purchased them previously. Apple announced earlier this week that it will unveil iCloud alongside iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion next week during its WWDC keynote on Monday, June 6th. BGR will be on hand to cover the event live.

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  • http://twitter.com/gragib G Ragib

    Just call it “beta” and be done with it.

    Remember the train wreck that was Apple’s last cloud launch – MobileMe?

    • Anonymous

      Do you remember the other train wrecks that was Google Buzz, Google Books, Google TV and Google Checkout??  I know right!

      • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR6HpRLyzMY Walter Sobchak

        That were*

      • http://twitter.com/gragib G Ragib

        Google Buzz at launch was a fiasco, I have to agree. Google TV needs more time in the oven. Google should just call it a “hobby”, you know, like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

        I don’t know if I’d call Google Books and Google Checkout failures. Google Books is great for public domain books, and Google Checkout powers the Android Market.

        Do you remember the iPod HiFi? It was supposed to replace all our stereo equipment. Or the Mighty Mouse? That should have been called the Tragic Mouse. How about Locationgate and Antennagate?

    • Anonymous

      A android fan talking about train wrecks. Very funny.

      • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR6HpRLyzMY Walter Sobchak

        An* android

      • Anonymous

        I know you’re an utter fanboy and won’t acknowledge this, but MobileMe’s launch was… less than flawless.

      • Anonymous

        I’m curious, by what definition is Android a “failure”?  Handsets activated, OS share growth?

      • http://twitter.com/gragib G Ragib

        I don’t know if using a product makes you a fanboy. I used a Nokia N95 first, then switched to the iPhone 3G and BlackBerry Pearl Flip, then the Palm Pre and Nexus One, and now on a Nexus S and HTC HD7.

        I’m not a fanboy. I just use what works for me. YMMV.

        My #1 reason for ditching iOS: the notifications system is not non-existent, it’s there, and it sucks. That’s what attracted me to Android and WebOS.

      • Anonymous

        Speaking of there notification system. My coworker and I were playing head to head in Home Run Battle 3D the other day and he got a text message that kicked him out of the game and ultimately made him lose. I just had to laugh.

  • http://about.me/brandonmccall brandonmccall

    That does me no good because A. I don’t purchase music through iTunes, B. I prefer an ad free experience, and C. Music Beta by Google isn’t half bad.

    • http://www.droiddoes.com/ Norm

      Google is free and open due to DROID so I totally agree.

    • Anonymous

      You think Google Music will remain ad-free?

    • Anonymous

      Google Music is free during beta.

  • Anonymous

    If it’s not an all-you -can eat type music service, who the hell cares. There are other “music clouds” that are device agnostic which I doubt iCloud will be, and they’re free. The only way I’ll ever consider this if it’s available on any device and is a stream any song, not just purchased/uploaded songs.

    • Anonymous

      If you think iCloud will be limited to music, then you’re likely going to be mistaken.

      The WWDC banners put Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud on equal footing. It’s going to be a big deal, tightly woven into Apple’s ecosystem.

      • http://twitter.com/gragib G Ragib

        I’m guessing iCloud = MobileMe + iWork Online + iTunes Cloud + much much more.

        iOS and Mac OS have SDKs you can develop against. To suggest that iCloud is on equal footing with these at a developer event suggests that it too might have an SDK, and hence much much bigger than [MobileMe + iWork Online + iTunes Cloud]. Think something like EC2 or Azure or App Engine. The Cocoa/Objective-C cloud. Is this why they killed Xserve?

        I’m only guessing.

    • numetheus

      I don’t recall anyone saying it was purely a streaming music service. It is going to be a cloud service where you store a lot more than just music.

  • http://www.droiddoes.com/ Norm

    Has iFail written all over it. 1.) doesn’t work on DROIDS 2.) owned by apple 3.) not free 4.) not open 5.) doesn’t allow me to steal music as easily as DROID DOES

    • Anonymous

      1. Google will give us access to all music at no cost. No matter what the labels say.

      B. Apple is evil and so are the labels.

      D. Goofans (aka Apple Haters) would rather eat fire than ever using an Apple product. No matter how good it may be. Just cause!

  • Anonymous

    Your post is much more ideological than logical.

  • http://twitter.com/DoubleONegative Nerdherder

    I don’t see why anyone should have to pay the recording labels to store the music we have already paid for.  I wish Apple would have challenged them on this issue, it probably would have made the iCloud service a little bit cheaper.

    • Bluelou65

      They still haven’t announce what it is.  cloud may be worth the $25; maybe not…

    • Anonymous

      What makes you think that an Apple product would be cheaper than… anything? You always pay for the gloss. I doubt the price would’ve come down because $25/yr is nothing. That’s approximately $2.08 a month. They’re probably just charging enough to make a little bit of money on their data center.

      I’m still waiting to hear on what iCloud is going to do for music that you own that is not part of their library. If you can’t add it, Google Music instantly becomes the superior choice. If you can… well, I still feel like Google Music is the superior choice because iTunes is such a bloated pile of misery on Windows.

  • http://twitter.com/Keoniinthecity Keoni

    How about us Mobile Me customers?

  • Biggles

    So let me get this straight…  $25/yr plus ads so I can store and listen to the music I already bought on the cloud?  FAIL.

    • Anonymous

      and you pay data on top. #FAIL x2

    • Anonymous

      I don’t believe that ads are for audio for music but ads on the website and ads in the iCloud application. Odds are the ads will be for content available in iTunes. Click an album or song, opens mobile iTunes so you can purchase whatever. 

      • Biggles

        Even visual ads on a paid service is double dipping.  Ridiculous.  And on an already too small iPhone screen?  Prepare to have that glorious pixel density wastefully consumed by unwanted content.  LOL at Apple.

      • Anonymous

        You morons already act like yal know what icloud is. Damn I guess we don’t have to wait till Monday to find out. You seem to know all the answers;) LOL

    • Anonymous

      When I can stream everything from my computer without paying a dime already, then I already know iCloud will NOT be worth $25 to only stream iTunes purchased songs.  I’m sorry, but I have live shows I’ve downloaded legally, Free Singles I’ve downloaded legally, and hundreds of CDs that I’ve ripped legally.  iCloud serves no purpose for anyone like me.

      • numetheus

        I want a cloud service that seamlessly stores all of my crap so I can not only view on my computer, but I can pick up my phone and/or tablet and get to exactly the same stuff. I’m hoping it will be for more stuff.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=579635241 Tony Edwards

      I dont get it if you have an ipod/iphone/ipad and you buy from itunes and then download it and sync it.. unless you have massive amounts of music wont it already be on the device? .. 

  • Booboolala2000

    Fail!

    • http://twitter.com/jj_hh1 J Hamburg

      check back in a 6 month and my guess is Samsung copied it – oh wait, Samsung doesn’t make clouds – so Google copied it :)

  • Anonymous

    This is going to be the worst thing that ever happened to Apple, just wait and see.  Wait until someone actually reads the terms of service and realizes that by accepting the service they are verifying that ALL of the music in their iTunes account was acquired legally.  Then wait for the conspiracy theories to start.  It won’t be two weeks in before people start claiming the recording industry is looking into individual Tunes accounts for pirated music.  None of this will probably be true but it won’t matter.  Perception is reality.  Getting in bed with the recording industry is going to be a colossal mistake.

    • Anonymous

      If you have pirated music, you deserve to get caught.

      Still, Apple hasn’t made a habit of sharing private data. They just keep it for themselves, supposedly anonymously. 

      • Anonymous

        I want to share something with you; much of the music that people play on their iDevices is pirated.  I’m not condoning piracy.  I’m stating a simple fact.  Apple has sold about 500 million music devices and only 10 billion songs.  Do the math.  It doesn’t add up.  Apple is a hardware company.  It makes money by selling devices, not music.  If there is any perception Apple is working with the recording industry to crack down on piracy that will hurt their business.  Now, I very much doubt Apple would ever share client information but that doesn’t matter.  Perception is reality.  In one corner you have Apple and the recording industry working closely to curtail piracy.  In the other corner you have Google and Amazon who seeming can’t get along with the recording industry.  Who is the average privacy conscious person going trust? iCloud is going to be a colossal failure and it will hurt Apple’s real business, selling devices.

      • Anonymous

        Your opinion is noted.  I  have no data that indicates that the vast majority of iTunes users pirate music.  I see people buy CDs and burn them into their collection, for personal use.  This is fair use per Apple’s ToS and commercial copyright.  I am only stating a simple fact.   ‘much’ assumes ‘more than 50%.’  I would posit that ‘some’ music of ‘some’ people is pirated.  Not a vast majority.

        My perception:  Any company that gives me a free service is selling my information to someone else.
        You worry about Apple.  I trust apple more than I trust Google or Amazon.  The latter two make money only on sales and services of information, and the most valuable information they have is the information of their ‘users.’ 

        iCloud will simplify the myriad of integration requirements that people desire for their mobile and home devices, but don’t want to become system/network administrators to setup.  If Apple doesn’t screw it up, It will be a colossal success for the billions of people that don’t know the difference between TLS and TCP, and just want to eliminate the ‘sync’ part of consolidating their digital experience, as well as providing simple offsite backups, reducing overall network latency by integrating handheld, desktop, LAN based storage, and WAN/Internet based storage into a seamless information lattice.

        For the the rest of the people (10′s of thousands)  who pay cash at the grocery store to consumer information leakage, don’t believe that PCI compliant organizations are, have 3 tor onion proxies running on their laptop and have encrypted AFS working across it, and build open source firewalls out of spare HP-57s, Apple is not their solution.

    • Anonymous

      Yea yea yea!! You the same retards that said iTunes, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Macs, etc. Were all going to fail too. You guys crack me up. We know yal hate Apple, but please your envyness bleeds:)

      • Anonymous

        I said nothing of the sort.  I own an iPhone and said it would be a HUGE hit.  I own many iPods and I love them.  I don’t own an iPad because I would never buy a media consumption device that was capable of playing so few media file types.  It seems a little dumb to me.  iCloud will fail because it promises to threaten the very core of the Apple business model, selling devices that play digital media.  By the way, what is “yea, yea, yea”.  Are you a pirate?

      • Anonymous

        Bro even if there any truth to what you own I could care less. My point is I guess I will not have to read about or watch the Keynote Monday because you know exactly what iCloud is going to be. I mean let Apple announce the damn thing first officially than make your critical comments.

      • Anonymous

        For the record “Bro” you just wrote that you care. I think you mean you
        could NOT care less. Stay in school.

      • Anonymous

        Oh thank you so much for the grammar clarification! No, college is over for me. So is the military. Been there done that. Now, unlike you, I am a contributor to society not mooching off Mommy and Daddy’s free rent and board. Chow I am done with you:)

      • Anonymous

        Okay, go back to school. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

      • Anonymous

        Yea a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Now get off Mommy’s tit and go to work:)

      • Anonymous

        “Yea a mind is a terrible think to waste. Not get off Mommy’s tit and go to
        work”

        Priceless

  • Anonymous

    And we where did Mr. Alex Pham of the LA Times get this information?

  • Anonymous

    The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is the industry group that represents the music industry worldwide.  That body did a study in 2009 and concluded that almost 95% of all digital music was acquired illegally.  I would say that qualifies as the vast majority.  Since Apple sells a good portion of the devices that play that digital music I would humbly posit that “much” of the music on those iDevices was also acquired illegally.  I know you will suggest that people are buying CD’s, ripping them.  I strongly doubt that accounts for a large percentage of digital music.  Teenage kids do not buy CD and they certainly don’t rip them when they can get the songs they want online at no cost very, very easily.As for the rest of your post, you’re missing my point.  If people perceive Apple is working closely with the recording industry to curtail piracy via iCloud that will very much hurt the sales of their devices.  It is inevitable that people will make that association.I’m happy for you that you trust Apple more than Google and Amazon.  I hope that works out for you.

  • NCBuckeye

    Forget the iCloud, when will ios5 be out?  Will they release this before the new iphone or wait until it releases?

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