iTunes Match In-Depth

Perhaps the most anticipated of Monday’s WWDC announcements, the positive response from attendees was palpable when Steve Jobs announced iTunes Match towards the end of the company’s keynote. This service—for a modest $24.99/year—supplements the standard features of iTunes in the Cloud, granting users access to music acquired outside the iTunes Music Store across their devices.

While this aspect of the already revolutionary iCloud service stands to redefine the ways music is both enjoyed and stored, there are a few details and limitations worth noting, that were not covered at length during Jobs’ presentation.

The most common misconception of iTunes Match is that it is a streaming service. While streaming access to the entirety of your music library over Wi-Fi and 3G would be amazing, the burden it would have placed on wireless carriers would be far too much to bear. Admittedly, while the service was being announced, I imagined streaming my sizable library over 3G to my iPhone on my daily commute. Presuming integration with an “iCloud iPod” app of some kind, I was eager to banish Pandora and its hoard of annoying ads from my morning routine. Unfortunately, however, iTunes Match doesn’t offer this exact functionality—at least, not yet.

Later, after reading Apple’s official description of the service, I realized my initial impressions formed during the keynote were a bit off. iTunes Match essentially performs the same functions of iTunes in the Cloud with the added bonus of being compatible with any songs in a user’s library, regardless of the source. This means while the entirety of a subscriber’s library is technically available on-the-go for up to 10 devices, songs must first be downloaded to a respective device before being played back. This raises concerns over space limitations and time. As iTunes Match content must physically “live” on an iOS device, large libraries are still not a reality. Furthermore, users must select albums or songs to download, and then wait for them to complete before listening. This takes considerably more time and planning than simply streaming matched content at will.

A final factor to consider is that the current version of iOS does not include a means for deleting music directly from a device. This raises a flag when considering the amount of new content suddenly available for download with an iTunes Match membership. If you’ve already loaded an iPhone with several thousand songs from your Mac, chances are you won’t have tons of room for additional music via iCloud. This problem would be remedied had Apple included a method for deleting music directly from a device in iOS 4. Though unannounced at WWDC, perhaps better music management will make its way into iOS 5 to better accommodate the release of iTunes Match this fall.