According to new research from mobile analytics service Mobilewalla, Sunday is the best day to release a mobile app, but Wednesday is the most popular day among developers. The company studied the apps released in the iTunes App Store and Android Market over a 17-week period between May 16th and September 8th, 2011, to determine its findings. During this time, there were 91,754 iOS apps released into the iTunes App Store and 122,220 apps released into the Android Market.

Yes, that’s a lot of apps! The company reported earlier in December that the app count rose to 987,863 across all four platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone) and is now growing at an average of 2,000 apps per day. In the last 12 months, iOS apps grew from 338,000 to 589,148. Android apps grew from 115,000 to 319,774.

During the 119 days of the study, Mobilewalla sorted apps by the day of the week they were released. However, it should be noted that on Android, developers control the release date, while iOS apps’ release dates are affected by the iTunes review cycle. So it may not be fair to proclaim Wednesday as developer’s “favorite” day universally, given that they’re not always in control of the release timeframe.

Even if Sunday was not always the developers’ chosen launch day, Mobilewalla found that apps released then statistically performed the best. That is, they made it into the list of the top 240 mobile applications. In this case, Mobilewalls is defining the “top 240″ apps as those that achieve the highest ranking in their respective stores. 42% of the iOS apps released on a Sunday made it into the top 240, while 11% of Android apps did the same.

Meanwhile, Thursdays were the worst day to release apps on Android, as only 7% of apps reached the top 240 then. On iOS, Fridays were the worst, as only 10% of apps reached the top 240.

Although unrelated to trends regarding the best and worst days of the week to launch, the company stumbled upon a relatively sad finding during its research: an app on Apple’s platform is four times more likely to be discovered than an app on the Android Market. That speaks to the challenges Google still has to overcome in terms of its ability to better showcase the best new apps within its app store, perhaps.

Explains Anindya  Datta,  Ph.D., founder  and  chairman  of  Mobilewalla, “Apple users discover apps more conveniently than Android users. And while it is impossible to identify exact causes for this pattern, users may find it easier to browse items in the relatively low number of apps launched over the weekend.”

Starting next Tuesday, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Lightstorm Entertainment will be selling a special edition of blockbuster movie AVATAR with nifty behind-the-scenes features and content exclusively on iTunes, in standard definition, for $14.99 (or $19.99 for the HD version).

Available for pre-order now, the special digital edition of the movie lets people ‘deconstruct scenes’ in simultaneous views to, basically, see how director James Cameron applied special effects throughout the science-fiction flick while you’re watching.

From the press release:

“This new feature will also enable consumers to interact with the performance capture and visual effects levels in 17 of the film’s scenes. For the first time ever, Green Screen X-ray gives users an interactive look through the visual effects levels to see the original green screen footage behind a pivotal scene.”

Check out the video below to check out what it, well, looks like.

“AVATAR iTunes Extras Special Edition” also includes an original screenplay by Cameron, his ‘scriptment’ (a novella with some scenes broken out into dialogue) and a gallery of 1,700 images.

AVATAR is the highest-grossing film of all time, generating nearly $2.8 billion in worldwide box office.

As expected, the launch of iTunes Match is now upon us, with today’s release of iTunes 10.5.1, available from the iTunes website here. For those living under the proverbial rock, iTunes Match is the new service from Apple that gives you legal access to store all your music in iCloud – even those songs you didn’t originally purchase from iTunes. For $25 per year, iTunes Match will match tracks in your music collection to those in the iTunes catalog – a catalog that now includes over 20 million songs.

In theory, iTunes Match is meant to pair up the songs in your library you ripped from CDs, but in reality, it means your pirated tunes can now be made legal for a mere $25/year. And if you have an extensive collection of indie artists, local bands or DJs that live outside the i-Universe, iTunes Match will upload those MP3′s to iCloud, too. Once in iCloud, music can be streamed to any device and stored at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality – even if the original song was pirated purchased at lower quality.

The new service is just one of the features in iTunes 10.5.1, which also includes baked-in iCloud support, enabling you to access your songs, apps and books across all your Apple devices, without having to manually re-download the purchases on each additional device you own. The iCloud service lets you access and download past purchases, too, on whichever device you want.

The update to iTunes is out now, but iTunes Match is available only for U.S. users (sorry, world). To enable the service, you’ll need to switch it on after iTunes is installed.

P.S. For those of you who remember the debate about whether or not what iTunes Match is doing can be called “streaming,” you may be interested to see that Apple now uses the word “streaming” on its website to describe the service: “Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it to any of your devices…”

If you’re not already running on the developer build of iOS 5 (whether you’re an actual developer, or a cough-cough-yeah-for-sure-I’m-totally-a-”developer”-shut-up-and-give-me-iOS-5), tomorrow’s the big day. After roughly 4 months of Beta builds, iOS 5 is finally launching to everybody.

Before you can dive in, though, you’ll need iTunes 10.5 — anything less just won’t do the trick. Looking to ensure that their servers don’t eat it too hard with tomorrow’s launch, Apple has opted to make the iTunes bit of the equation available this morning.

It’s been a while since 10.5 began rolling out in Beta capacity, so here’s a quick recap of the big new features:

• iTunes Match: For $25 a year, iTunes Match will give you legal digital access to any songs you own (be it through legal means or not). Match won’t actually launch until late October, but support is built into 10.5.
• Patches a number of Windows-specific security issues
• WiFi syncing support (when paired with iOS 5)
• Purchase history (for books, apps, etc) through iCloud

If you’ve got a beta build of iTunes 10.5 already up and running, you’ll need to reinstall manually to move to the final release (the Beta considers itself “Up to date”, though it’s set to expire in around 3 days.) Otherwise, you can update iTunes through the usual means, or by downloading it manually here.

It’s been a busy morning in Cupertino at Apple’s ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ keynote. The big headline was the iPhone 4S, but no iPhone 5. Perhaps you had a hard time following all the news from Apple on the iPhone, iOS 5, other iOS devices and apps. Apple didn’t offer a live online webcast to the public. But the TechCrunch team, on two continents, has been busy tracking all the Apple news. Click on any of the headlines for more info:

The Live Blog

• MG Siegler’s Live Blog From London

iPhone 4S

• Apple Officially Announces The iPhone 4S: Same Design, All New Insides
• The iPhone 4S—It’s What’s On The Inside That Counts
• Watch: Here’s Apple’s iPhone 4S Video Intro
• The iPhone 4S Camera Upgrade Explained
• Apple Announces “Cheaper iPhones: The Old Ones

iOS 5

• iOS 5 To Be Available To Everyone On October 12th

Siri – Your Humble Personal Assistant App

• Apple Reveals Siri Voice Interface: The “Intelligent Assistant” Only For iPhone 4S
• The Original Siri App Gets Pulled From The App Store, Servers Killed
• Siri: My “Humble” Female Personal Secretary

Other Apps

• Forstall Intros New And Improved iOS Apps: Cards, iMessage, And More
• Apple Announces ‘Find My Friends’ — Which Parents Can Use To Track Their Child’s Location

iPod Nano & Touch

• iPod Nano Updated With Improved Fitness Features
• Apple Drops iPod Touch Prices, Adds iOS 5 And iCloud

The Reaction

• “Access Denied”: Apple.com Goes Down Post-iPhone 4S Event
• Apple Stock Drops 5 Percent After The iPhone 5 Fails To Appear
• TCTV: Is The iPhone 4S A Worthwhile Upgrade?

How The Predictions Fared

• Apple iPhone 4S/5 Rumors: What Was Right, Wrong and Just Plain Crazy
• Where Was Facebook At The Apple Event Today? Not There. Stay Tuned.

Apple’s Latest Stats

• Six Million Copies of OS X Lion Sold, Outpaces Snow Leopard
• iTunes Now Has 20M Songs; Over 16B Downloads
• Apple Has Sold 300 Million iPods In Ten Years, 45 Million Just Last Year
• Tim Cook: 250 Million iOS Devices Sold, Huge Retail Traffic, Record Numbers Everywhere
• Tim Cook: 250M iOS devices Sold, The iPad Is The Undisputed Best-Selling Tablet In the World”
• More Than 1 Billion iOS Apps Are Downloaded Each Month
• Tim Cook: iPhone Has 5% Of Mobile Phone Marketshare Worldwide, “An Enormous Opportunity”

This page will be updated.

As the summer winds down and we near the fall, we know two things are for sure about to enter existence in the world of Apple: iOS 5 and iCloud. Given that both offer third-party developers various opportunities, both are in the process of being tested by that community. And that means things are starting to leak out. Tonight brought perhaps the biggest surprise revelation yet: iTunes in the Cloud will support streaming as well as downloading of music.

Now, before everyone works themselves into a tizzy yelling “FIRST!!!”, yes, it’s true that other music services have offered cloud-based streaming before — notably both Google Music Beta and Amazon Cloud Player this past summer. But neither of those is iTunes, the largest music retailer on the planet (online or “offline”). And there are plenty of other services that are streaming-only. It now seems certain that this fall, iTunes will offer both cloud downloading and cloud streaming.

And this is a big deal because during the iCloud unveiling at WWDC in June, Apple didn’t say a word about streaming. This led everyone to believe the feature wouldn’t be implemented when the service launched — a disappointment, for sure. But it now appears that Apple pulled the old “under-promise, over-deliver” trick. iTunes Match went live to developers for testing earlier tonight and music streaming from the cloud is already up and running.

It’s entirely possible that Apple didn’t announce streaming at WWDC because they didn’t yet have the music labels’ permission for the feature and now they do. It’s also possible that they don’t feel they need the labels’ permission — after all, neither Google nor Amazon obtained it before launching their services, and both are still live. It’s also possible that the MP3tunes decision last week affected Apple’s position. Regardless of how it happened, it happened. And that’s great news for everyone.

It also shows Apple’s prowess when it comes to the little customer delights. Apple announced iTunes in the Cloud and people were excited, but a little letdown by the functionality. But Apple was also announcing it at least four months prior to launch — something they don’t typically like to do with products. When iTunes in the Cloud finally does fully launch, Apple probably wants a few other surprises to show off at the unveiling (undoubtedly at the fall event, which typically is focused around music). One of those can now be music streaming from the cloud (though a bit spoiled by the developer leaks tonight).

Compare that to the way Google launched their cloud music service. Originally unveiled at Google I/O in May 2010, indications were that the service would launch later that year. Instead, everyone had to wait until a year later at I/O 2011 to get a rough version of the service. And I do mean rough: Google Music Beta requires you to upload all your music to Google’s servers in order to work. And there is absolutely no store attached to it for buying new music online. That’s still the case now, four months after the launch of the beta. Google over-promised and under-delivered.

Compared to Google Music Beta and Amazon Web Player, there’s now little question that iTunes in the Cloud is superior. Not only can you stream any song in your library, you won’t have to upload most of them — iTunes will match them with their files already in the cloud. The only thing iTunes in the Cloud is lacking is web support. But again, iTunes is the biggest music retailer in the world — most people who buy music have access to it. Android users may be shit out of luck, but that’s probably a feature, not a bug.

iTunes in the Cloud brings other surprises too. Notably, you can stream any TV show you’ve purchased on iTunes from the cloud as well. One has to imagine that movies will be next (though the rights may be trickier there). Again, none of this was announced with iTunes in the Cloud at WWDC.

The iTunes streaming functionality also opens the door a bit more for another possibility: the “cloud iPhone“. Rumors continue to circulate that Apple could unveil a low-cost iPhone 4 alongside a new iPhone 5 this fall. And if they do, it may come with a minimal amount of on-board storage. Instead, it may rely on the cloud for most content, including music. Now that iTunes has streaming functionality, this is possible.

Below, find some videos of the iTunes Match functionality on a computer and on an iPhone, by way of Insanely Great Mac.

Update: There’s some debate going on right now about whether or not this is technically streaming. Even Apple is avoiding the term, as Peter Kafka points out. There are two reasons for this — reasons Google follows as well with their service.

Streaming music service Rdio from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, is today launching two new music gifting options – physical gift cards and online credits. Consumers will be able to purchase the virtual gift card options in $10, $25, $50 and $100 values or in user-selected amounts. Meanwhile, physical cards in the $10 and $25 values will be sold in over 600 Target retail stores here in the U.S.

The Rdio Gift Card is flexible in that it doesn’t specify how the money has to be used. The recipient can choose to use it towards their monthly subscription, offline music downloads or with the recently announced Rdio Unlimited Family Plan.

Rdio vs. iTunes – “Rent” vs. “Own”

The gift cards are the first time that Rdio is being sold in retail stores in the U.S. Although they’ll be sold alongside top competitor iTunes, the two services are actually quite different. iTunes charges you for the music you download, which can then be saved and synced to your Apple devices. Rdio, instead, provides streaming access to all the music in its catalog of nearly 11 million songs for a monthly fee. In other words, with iTunes you own the music you buy, but with Rdio, for the most part, you rent it.

Like Apple’s forthcoming iTunes Match service, Rdio also employs a matching tool which scours your local library (in iTunes or Windows Media Player) to look for the names of artists, albums and songs that are already available in its catalog. This is included with Rdio’s monthly fee, but Apple will charge $25/year to do the same. However, Apple will also upgrade tracks to a high-quality, DRM-format when performing its match.

In addition, Rdio users can buy select tracks for offline listening, if desired – a feature that’s more on par with the traditional iTunes offering. Often this option is due to the music labels and/or rightsholders’ restrictions on streaming.

The new Rdio gift cards are available at Target now, or on Rdio’s website at www.rdio.com/gift.

Apple has been planning to launch a new cloud-based movie streaming service, which would allow you to re-download your movie purchases to other devices for no extra charge. The service, a part of “iTunes Replay,” was originally planned to launch within “the coming weeks,” according to multiple reports.

But now it seems that will not be the case.

The movie downloading service would have been similar to the newly added feature on Apple TVs which allows you to stream any TV show episode that you had previously purchased using your iTunes account. These shows appear in the “Purchased” section of the iTunes store on desktop and mobile, as well as on the Apple TV itself.

After this feature was added through a recent software update for the Apple TV, there was hope that support for movies was just around the corner.

Unfortunately, that support may be a long time coming.

According to CNET, citing multiple film industry sources, Apple has yet to sign agreements with four of the top six movie studios, and negotiations could continue for many months.

One of the problems has to do with the “HBO Window” – the period of time after a movie’s release on DVD during which HBO has the exclusive electronic distribution rights to the films. HBO has deals with three of the six major studios, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros., which means only HBO can stream their movies within that designated time frame. iTunes cannot offer streaming access to these movies at the same time.

While such a blackout period wouldn’t necessarily prevent Apple from launching a  cloud-based movie streaming service, it would make the service less attractive to consumers. However, it would not prevent Apple from signing deals with the studios not tied to HBO: Disney, Paramount, and Sony Pictures. Apple could choose to rollout a mixed offering, where some studio releases are available before others, even though they both arrived on DVD at the same time.

Image credit: MacRumors

An Apple TV update is rolling out today. But this device update isn’t the news. Sure, streaming purchased TV shows to the device is a welcomed, but not really novel idea. Now, post update, users will have the choice to either buy or rent a TV show and stream it to their Apple TV. Great. But this update turns Apple’s little hobby into a full-fledged money-making machine.

The Apple TV is a sort of Trojan Horse. At only $99, Apple diehards and general consumers alike have been buying up the streamer in mass since it debuted. But it’s always felt, well, like Apple said, a hobby device or rather a side-project with an incomplete feature set and gimped media offering. Up until AirPlay, the Apple TV felt a bit like a sucker’s device, a high-margin product designed to draw out a few more dollars from Apple buyers.

Not any more. The Apple TV is now the living room division of what’s sure to be a huge offensive by Apple. TV episodes bought on any device now are now accessible on other Apple devices and vice versa. Spend $2.99 to buy an episode of Community and it’s available on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and now Apple TV. Don’t underestimate Apple’s reach now. TV shows are likely only the beginning. This cloud streaming storage method will likely work with movies as well — as long as the movie studios play ball.

Apple has long relied on iTunes for local content delivery. Plug in your iPod and your media library was synced to the the device. But this requires local storage, which is slow, expensive and not very flexible. Once Apple puts video content in the cloud, a device’s local storage is left to just handle the trivial task of storing music and photos.

The update seems to be only for the US market right now. Other markets are likely on tap for the coming days and/or weeks.

The Apple TV is no longer a hobby, for Steve & Co.. It’s now a made man of the iTunes cartel. Apple has always made it easy for its users to spend money. Forget renting a TV show, Apple wants users to spend three times as much, but have access to it forever on all of their Apple devices. Sounds like a fair deal to me.

The Financial Times would rather not have Apple take a 30 percent cut of in-app subscriptions for its iOS publications, and has launched a HTML5 Web app that enables readers to access content across tablets and smartphones.

As part of the Web app’s debut, FT will provide free access during launch week.

In a thinly veiled jab at Apple, Financial Times CEO John Ridding comments:

“The FT Web App offers our customers flexibility and freedom of choice with access to our global journalism anytime, anywhere, with a single login or subscription. In a world of increasingly digital complexity we want to keep our service simple, easy to use and efficient to offer our customers the best possible experience of FT journalism.”

The browser app enables readers to access content when offline by saving a shortcut to articles, receive automatic updates without the need to download new versions of the app and access content exclusively made for tablets.

An upcoming feature is ‘Clippings’, a service that will allow users to read articles later, either on their tablet or on their desktop PC. Sound familiar? (look for ‘reading list’)

FT acknowledges that the Web app has been initially optimized for the iPhone and the iPad, but says it will also be adapted for Android-based devices and the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Accessing FT content is free for up to ten articles per month, if you register.

In a few weeks, Apple will start charging publishers 30 percent of revenues while trying to enforce a rule that their content subscribers must sign up through the iTunes App Store rather than directly with them.

FT in a Q&A about the new app says there are benefits to a Web app, for one because developing multiple native apps for various products is “logistically and financially unmanageable” and because it allows users too see new changes and features immediately.

FT also points out that with a Web app, there is no extended release process through an app store and also offers technical advantages such as access to hardware APIs.

The publisher also notes the challenges with creating the HTML5 app:

The breadth of tools and documentation available for native apps and even desktop HTML5 development is just not there for mobile-based web app development. In addition the usual testing tools for both functional and performance testing do not exist, so we had to invent our own systems and processes to make sure the app worked effectively.

Be sure to read analyst Benedict Evans’ take on the news.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs just announced his infamous “one more thing” at WWDC and it’s iTunes In The Cloud-related; iTunes Match will upgrade your ripped songs to 256 kpbs AAC DRM-free for a $24.99 yearly subscription.

Basically iTunes Match will scan a users iTunes library for any music you haven’t bought through iTunes and subscribers will be able to get a high quality copy of those songs for iTunes In The Cloud.

“It takes just minutes. Not weeks,” said Jobs on the turnover time to upgrading your music, using hyperbole to poke fun at competitors Google and Amazon who have also recently launched their own cloud services.

iTunes Match will rest on the fact that iTunes has 18 million songs already available in the iTunes store, “The chances are good we have the songs you’ve ripped. So we have software to scan your music and match it with the store,” Jobs explained. “We give that music the same benefits as purchased music.”

So Apple’s basically betting you’ll pay $25 a year to legalize all your content, and for the convenience of having it with you everywhere. Guess that’s better than losing the $25 you weren’t paying Apple before.

Once far off in the distance, iCloud is now quickly approaching. It will be a new service with many layers that Apple will first unveil on Monday during the keynote at WWDC. But the most interesting layer, at least from a consumer perspective initially, is the music one. And the details continue to emerge about what’s likely coming.

Today, two reports state that Apple has finalized deals with all four major music labels. CNet notes that Universal is now on board as are many publishers. The LA Times confirms this and suggests that the publisher deals could be completed tomorrow. That means the service will be set for a Monday debut.

Great, right? Potentially. But there are also some troubling details.

First of all, CNet’s report states that while it will first talked about on Monday, the iTunes aspect of iCloud will not launch right away. Instead, it’s expected “soon”. We had previously heard that Apple was aiming for a fall launch of the service, but that likely got pushed up once Amazon and Google unveiled their (decidedly limited) cloud music offerings.

Second, and more importantly, the report says that the initial version of the service will only offer access to songs that have been purchased through iTunes. In other words, any songs ripped from a CD, or obtained through other online stores, or obtained through less-than-legal means, will not be included. That’s not good news.

It makes sense that the music labels would want such a limitation to ensure that pirates aren’t rewarded. But most of the talk up until now has been that Apple was working hard to ensure that all user music would be available in the cloud. This seems vital given users’ desires to work with existing music collections. Now CNet is saying that Apple is aiming to offer this more complete option “sometime in the future”.

Again, not good.

The LA Times report is a bit more disturbing because it talks about uploading. One killer feature of iTunes in iCloud was supposed to be the ability to mirror songs. That is, for iTunes to scan your hard drive, identify your music, and give you access to those same songs in iCloud without any uploading necessary. Both Amazon’s and Google’s service involve uploading — which is a huge pain in the ass — but that’s only because neither of them have the label (or publisher) deals in place. Apple will have those. So let’s hope LA Times simply misspoke there.

And that’s certainly possible. Other aspects of their report don’t make a ton of sense. For example, while CNET says the label/publisher/Apple split for iTunes in iCloud will be 58/12/30, LA Times says that Apple will give a full 70 percent of revenue to the labels and another 12 percent to the publishers, leaving them with only 18 percent. The former split seems more likely given the current status quo, but LA Times went out of their way to update the post with this new split, so perhaps it is correct.

The oddest part of the LA Times post though is the talk about iCloud being advertising-supported. This would represent a big break in form for Apple — more along the lines of the Google model. It’s simply hard to imagine Apple doing something like that.

Of course, no other details are given, so who knows what that actually means.

LA Times also claims that while iTunes in iCloud would be free at first, there would be an annual fee of “about” $25 eventually. Apple is expected to charge for the service, but it may be bundled with other iCloud services, rather than broken out separately. Also, if they are charging the fee, the advertising talk seems even stranger.

Given that fairly loose-lipped music industry people (and Hollywood people as well) are involved, we can probably expect more to leak out before Monday. And let’s hope so, the talk right now is ranging from confusing to a bit disappointing.

[image: twitpic/@stop]

As we’ve suspected for a long time, Apple is very close to launching an online music service which may go by the name iCloud. The basic idea is that it will mirror your iTunes collection online so that it is available on any device without clunky cable syncing.

While getting rid of those cables will be a big step forward, if iCloud is nothing more than a music locker service it won’t go far towards transforming digital music, as BusinessWeek proclaims. Brad Stone and Andy Fixmer at BusinessWeek report that three out of the four major U.S. music labels have already signed up with Apple, and the fourth is about to sign. This will give Apple a huge advantage over already-announced music services from Amazon and Google, both of whom failed to secure licenses from the music industry and thus launched with compromised products. Since they don’t have the right licenses for streaming music, they require consumers to upload their music collections to the “locker” services. (Apparently, Google was willing to pay the labels $100 million up front for the music rights, “but talks broke down over the music industry’s concern that search results in Google and YouTube often point to pirated music”). Apple will simply index your collection and mirror it without the need for bulky uploads. Here is how BusinessWeek describes Apple’s upcoming iCloud music service:

Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers’ digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user’s hard drive isn’t good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars.

. . . While it may be a huge shift, it won’t be free. Apple no doubt has paid dearly for any cloud music licenses, and it’s unclear how much of those costs it will eat or pass on to consumers. One possibility would be to bundle an iCloud digital locker into Apple’s MobileMe online service, which currently costs $99 a year and synchronizes contacts, e-mail, Web bookmarks, and other user data across multiple devices.

So let me get this straight. Apple’s iCloud will be iTunes online, with a few features that make it slightly better than Google’s Music Beta—namely, I won’t have to spend hours uploading my music collection and I will get better quality audio files for some songs. That’s all great, but I am not sure it is enough for me to pay a monthly subscription. If it’s bundled with MobileMe, it certainly would make that service more appealing, but I wouldn’t pay for iCloud as a standalone service if that is all there is to it. And certainly, this could turn out to be only one part of a revamped MobileMe service. Depending on what else will be added, iCloud could help push more MobileMe subscriptions overall.

But let’s take iCloud as a standalone service. If it’s so great, people should be willing to pay for it on its own. But why would I pay a monthly subscription for the privilege to listen to my own music collection streamed from the Internet? I’ve already paid for all those songs, and now I am going to pay again just to have them available online? I don’t think so. Guess what, I can already do that for free with Google Musc beta. Sure, it takes a while to upload all of your songs. But it’s all done in the background with a music manager desktop software that you download. When I did it, I was surprised at how fast my songs became available—so much so that I thought Google was mirroring my collection. (You can see what Google Music Beta looks like in this episode of Fly or Die, which I’ve embedded below).

Forget about streaming your own collection from the cloud. That’s great and all, and it should be a feature of iTunes included for free. If I am going to pay a monthly subscription for a music service, I’d better be getting access to any song I want. I’d rather sign up for Rhapsody, Rdio, or (one day) Spotify, and get unlimited access to millions of songs. If Apple wants to truly transform digital music again, it needs to change the way we consume and pay for it. If iCloud is just a better music locker, it’s not terribly exciting. If it’s also a jukebox in the sky with a full-blown music subscription service tied to my existing iTunes collection—well, now I’m listening.

Photo Credit/Flickr/Kevin Dooley

As much as I love Rdio, and I do love Rdio, I can’t always guarantee that the mobile app will start playing music when I press play. There’s always this waiting game as my Droid X fights for enough Verizon bandwidth to start streaming. Once the little blue bar partially fills up, signifying that there’s enough of a buffer for seamless playback, the song starts. This is where Apple will offer something better and different.

This patent describes a cloud music service that stores part of the media locally. This way there’s no waiting and when you press play and the device will start with just a sliver of the media, being a song, book, or movie, from a local source while keying up the rest from the cloud. Apple describes the service as being “seamless and invisible to the user,” and if it works as described, it probably will be. The patent also describes a scheme where chunks throughout the media file are stored locally rather than just the beginning, which could be more of a built-in security feature than a buffer for the stream.

According to a chart in the filing, it seems this will be optional as there’s a check box to “Sync partial music” noting that the minimum connection speed is 3G. Of course this would free up considerable amount of space, but would likely only work for music currently in a person’s iTune collection and not available for on-demand streaming like Rdio or Spotify is known for — perhaps once an on-demand song plays once, a portion is cached permanently though.

Now this is just a patent, from 2009 no less, so the exact cloud music service Apple rolls out could be different, but we all know that it will likely be, as Apple says here, seamless and invisible to the user. (and locked down as tight as Jobs & Co. can manage)

With regard to their cloud music offering, it looks like Apple is now just about ready to rock and roll. It would seem that this is now coming together even faster than they anticipated. And that may be thanks to two unlikely sources: Google and Amazon.

CNet’s Greg Sandoval is reporting tonight that Apple has signed an agreement with music label EMI to offer its music through Apple’s upcoming new cloud music service. This means that Apple now has agreements in place with two of the four major labels (Warner signed last month). And Sandoval believes that deals with the remaining two, Sony and Universal, could be wrapped up as early as next week. Again, rock and roll.

With those deals in place, it means that Apple will be free to launch their cloud service anytime they please. And while we had heard the initial plan was to do so at their annual music event in the early fall, Apple could indeed move the launch up to WWDC in early June (just a few weeks from now). We haven’t heard anything definitive about this either way, but you can bet that Apple is thinking about it.

It would be a pretty savvy move. One that would make their rivals look bad. Really bad.

You see, while Apple is believed to have had the infrastructure work done for a while for their cloud music offering, the hold up was these label deals. Negotiations have been ongoing for months, and given the stakes, it seems likely that they could have gone on for many more months. Then Amazon decided to get ballsy.

They launched their own cloud music service in March without any of the labels signed on, surprising everyone. Legally, they said they had the right to do this since customers are placing this music in digital vaults in the cloud in the same way they might put music on an MP3 player. The labels, not surprisingly, disagree.

When Amazon did that, Google, which had also been negotiating with the music labels for at least a year, also decided they needed to get their offering out there. Last week at Google I/O, they launched Google Music in beta. Again, the labels were pissed off.

And guess who they ran to?

As Sandoval reported last week, following Google’s Music announcement:

Nonetheless, the hope in the music industry is that Apple’s music service will make the competing offerings look shabby by comparison and force Amazon and Google to pay the licensing rates the labels are asking.

So the labels, which for the better part of a decade now have been looking for someone, anyone to help counter Apple’s power in their business, is turning right back to Apple when they need help. And Apple will obviously gladly welcome them with open arms. After all, with these licenses, Apple will have secured the cloud music high ground despite being the last to launch.

Think about it. With these agreements, Apple is likely going to be able to do the one thing that is absolutely crucial for cloud music to take off: offer library syncing without uploading. In other words, Apple now likely be able to do what Lala (the company Apple bought in late 2009 and subsequently shut down) was able to do: scan your hard drive for songs and let you play those songs from their servers without having to upload them yourself.

It’s hard to overstate how critical this is. Right now, Amazon makes you upload your own library for any song you haven’t purchased from them since their service launched (those you purchase from them can automatically be added to your locker). Google doesn’t even have a music purchase option at all yet, so you have to upload music.

As Jason and I talked about on OMG/JK this week, that means hours or days of uploading — that’s what he had to go through. How many people are realistically going to do that? Not a lot.

But because neither Amazon nor Google have the label agreements — the key thing we warned about months ago when people were buzzing about Google Music rumors — they have no choice. Apple has a choice. And will fully take advantage of it.

Both Amazon and Google have complained that the terms the labels want are unacceptable and untenable for a business. Yet, it looks like Apple has been able to work them out. And that may well be thanks to, yep, Amazon and Google.

[image: flickr/dagoaty]

The iTunes cloud should work like a locker/streaming service. This would allow users to dump their music into the cloud and access it anywhere or, barring that, offer a monthly service to access albums on the go, a concept similar to Rdio and Spotify.

I suppose the biggest question is how Apple will handle huge collections of music that most active MP3 users have squirreled away over time. While purchased titles will be simple – they’re simply a symbolic link to a central “gold” version – there is no clear way for Apple to support the uploading of 500 versions of “Hey Soul Sister,” all of slightly differing lengths and titles.

AllThingsD has more information on the deal noting that it is just like Amazon’s locker service but with one important caveat – Apple is actually getting the label’s permission to offer the service.

When Apple announced back in February that The Daily would be the first subscription news app on iTunes, it was seen by other publishers as the model going forward. Some like it, some don’t, but at least Apple knows how it wants to treat subscriptions going forward. Or does it?

Some subscription news apps seem to be in limbo right now while Apple figures out how to handle special situations. If you are a single-title publication like the New York Times, The Daily, or Businessweek, then it is pretty straightforward and the current rules apply. But what if you are a news reading app that brings together articles from many sources, some paid and some free? In other words, what if you are an aggregator app like Flipboard or Zite, but you want to charge a subscription for the app? How should that subscription be split up between the app and the publishers, and should Apple even be involved with policing those types of licensing and copyright issues? It’s all getting sorted out right now.

One of the issues revolves around Apple’s rules for listing subscription apps under free apps. They obviously aren’t free apps, but it helps with the marketing and getting people to try them out if they can start out free. In order to justify the free app description, subscription apps must offer something of value for anyone who downloads the app—perhaps a free issue of a magazine, or free top stories. Then the in-app subscription unlocks the full experience.

It’s a bait and switch because the apps become pretty much useless without the subscription. A free issue is a sample which becomes stale within a few weeks at most, then you have what amounts to a dead app on your iPad if you don’t subscribe.

For aggregator apps that want to go the subscription route, it is not clear what the free portion of the app would be. Is it just the open RSS stuff that comes free, and the subscription unlocks and articles behind a paywall? Or maybe you get the full app for a week and it doesn’t update unless you subscribe. But then you encounter the bait-and-switch problem.

Wouldn’t it be more honest if subscription news apps were listed under paid apps? Or at least under a new category: subscriptions.

The second most senior Democrat in the U.S. Senate, Dick Durbin, will propose a new scheme that would force online retailers like Amazon and iTunes to collect local taxes for each and every transaction. He’s expected to make the proposal the day after Tax Day, and it’s expected to be controversial within two seconds of having been announced.

You already know the story. Durbin, from Illinois, complained in February that out-of-state businesses (again, like Amazon and iTunes) were essentially freeloading off the taxes that local brick-and-mortar stores pay. Why should Amazon be able to sell you a Blu-ray disc without having to collect tax, but if you were to buy that same disc from the local Walmart? Exactly.

That’s the argument you’ll be seeing (and have been seeing), at least.

(I’m in New York, so I already pay sales tax on all my Amazon orders.)

Cnet kindly reminds us how convoluted this country’s tax structure can be. You can expect to pay sales tax on bottled soda in New Jersey, but not on bottled water, even cookies. A mink handbag is taxed in Rhode Island, but not a mink fur coat. It’s a big mess, in other words.

How well a new taxes scheme would get over in Congress remains to be seen. I can’t imagine too many Republicans coming out in favor of new taxes, but who knows?

What we’d probably need, more than anything else, is as close to a total re-write of the country’s tax code in order to bring it into the 21st century—just as we need a complete overhaul of copyright law. What are the odds of that happening?

“But you said you’ve read the terms and conditions… even God has not read the terms and conditions.”

Ballsy. Brilliant. Wonderful.

Of course, the service itself seems kind of “meh”. But I’m more than happy to take “meh” over nothing at all — which is exactly what the other big players have given us. It has been all empty promises (Google) and endless whispers (Apple). Amazon actually did it. And they deserve credit.

And now comes the legal game.

CNET’s Greg Sandoval has a great rundown of what exactly is going on following Amazon’s maneuver. MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka has a good follow-up on what comes next. And our own Robin Wauters looked at things from the perspective of the competitors. The basic gist? The labels are trying to figure out what action to take — if any — against Amazon for doing this without their permission. Of these, Sony seems the most annoyed and likely to act. But can they really do anything?

Amazon’s stated position seems to be “no”. Their basic argument is that when a customer buys a piece of content (be it music, movie, or something else), they own it. It should not matter if it resides on the hard drive in their computer or in space they lease from the cloud.

To that, I say: amen.

Of course, the actual situation is much more murky. It’s always been a bit of a gray area as to whether or not you actually “own” a piece of music when you buy it. This is because the labels have done a great job over the years negotiating comical terms of usage that you agree to without even realizing it. And that may include the ability to store your music on a remote server and stream it. That’s what this is all about, after all.

Further, as both Sandoval and Kafka point out, this may be more of a move by Amazon to simply get the ball rolling. The argument here is that Amazon could change things down the road as necessary. This may just be version one of their cloud offering, and it could be that version two does require some licensing agreements with the labels. Again, this is a very savvy move by Amazon.

But the fundamental issue here remains: should storage in the cloud that you pay for really be different from your local hard drive? Think about that for a second. It’s actually pretty ridiculous that people think it should be different.

Currently, if you buy a song on iTunes or Amazon or elsewhere, you’re free to play that song as often as you wish on your machine. You’re also free to burn it onto a CD or transfer it to an MP3 player. I’m just not sure how moving it to the cloud is any different.

The streaming aspect may seem to be an issue as that does require a different license. But this isn’t the same as listening to streaming music via a subscription service. Again, you’re supposed to “own” this music.

And going forward, we’re only going to see more and more of our content stored in the cloud. Services like Gmail took us one step, Google Docs took us another, now Dropbox, MobileMe, and Chrome OS are taking us the rest of the way. This is the future.

Of course, there’s an easy answer as to why the labels think the cloud is different from your hard drive: greed. As in, these guys are greedy and see dollar signs at every corner. It’s sad, really — and it speaks to the current state of the industry.

Here’s to hoping that Amazon sticks to their guns and continues calling the record labels on their ridiculous bluff with regard to music in the cloud. I don’t care what the fine print on the terms say, if you bought a song, you should be able to store it where you choose and play it back where you want.

Unless the labels would prefer that we not buy music in the first place…

[image: flickr/kevindooley]