Saturday, June 11, 2011

Numero Group 'declined' invite to iCloud

Via LA Times...

"There have been lots of figures thrown around in the stories relating to Apple's iCloud service, yet none are sitting right with Chicago's famed reissue label the Numero Group .... Label co-founder Rob Sevier said Tuesday that as of now the company was not going to make its catalog available for iCloud's scan-and-match service, a concept the label cautioned as a "great risk" in a post on its site.

"What they are offering to do is analogous to the replacement of a counterfeit painting with an original painting," Sevier said in a follow-up email.

At issue is Apple's intention to this fall launch an online storage service dubbed iCloud. A free version will give a user 5 gigabytes of storage, and also house any songs or albums purchased via the iTunes store. Yet for an annual fee of $24.99, which Apple will split with record labels and publishers, Apple will host high-quality audio files of songs on its servers, saving customers the task of uploading each song individually.

The iCloud will not differentiate between purchased songs and those acquired via peer-to-peer networks, and Sevier said Numero is concerned about the long-term effects of such a service for the industry. For instance, one apprehension was that if the company made its catalog available to iCloud, then those who obtained the label's releases via file-sharing networks could upload them and potentially see them replaced with higher-quality versions..."

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