The future of digital music is slowly taking form, and with it an unlikely group seems to be finding major advantages.
Apple announced Monday at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference one of its most anticipated new products - the iCloud.
Apple is marketing the new product as "iTunes in the Cloud," and while the technology may be over the heads of many, it's really not that complicated.
The free iCloud program on its own is fairly underwhelming, but iTunes Match is what should interest us.
"Here's how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store," reads the advertisement for iTunes Match. "Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device."
So yes, poor college student: that means you are granted amnesty for all your pirated songs. Apple is the first to monetize the pirating market, charging $25 a year for iTunes Match - a small price to pay for up to 25,000 songs in your iCloud.
The major advantage aside from legalizing your mostly illegal music collection is saving space. Once my 11,000-song library is matched into the iCloud, I can instantly stream any song from there on my iPhone without using any of its limited 16 GB of storage space.
To say that iTunes Match dominates Amazon and Google's cloud services would be an understatement. And by gaining the army of music pirates on his side, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has once again made his company the frontrunner in digital music.
