Sony Music latest to sign up for Apple's cloudy days

iCloud coming together nicely

20 May 2011 11:45 GMT / By Rik Henderson

Like London buses, you can wait ages for one iCloud story to arrive and several appear at once. Reports are circulating that Sony Music Entertainment is the latest of the big four record labels to sign up to Apple's cloud media service.

With Warner and EMI already on board, Apple only needs to get the Universal Music Group to sign on the dotted line, and it will have secured all of the big boys in the music biz.

As previously noted when EMI jumped on board, the licensing of tracks from the record giants allows Apple to store content on its servers ready for users to stream without each subscriber having to upload their own music collection first. This is a marked change from the plans of both Amazon and Google who, opting to travel the unlicensed route, require subscribers to undertake a lengthy process of transferring their files to online servers before being able to stream the remotely.

Apple's plans have also been reaffirmed with the discovery of a patent, which suggests that the company will only ask subscribers to host partial elements of media locally (such as meta tag information, perhaps).

Via: appleinsider.com

Read our review of the new iPad (3rd generation)

Full tags

Sony Music, Apple, Audio, iPhone, iPad, iTunes, iCloud