The long anticipated Apple streaming music service is reportedly ALMOST here. It’s been almost here for a while, maybe we should call it iChineseDemocracy. Anyway, the Guardian reports that Apple has officially signed EMI and Warner to participate in the venture and Sony and Universal are very close to coming on board as well, which would give the service a whole lot of major label support. Google and Amazon both launched cloud based music storage systems recently without major label support, both positing that they already had the right to let consumers store music on their servers. Apple’s product will be a little different in that they’re getting signed deals first and it may be more like a Spotify or Rdio model where you can listen to music you don’t own, possibly for a nominal monthly fee. Apple has a lot more leverage to get labels to comply because iTunes is the biggest music seller in the world.
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