iTunes Match is a music syncing service similar to Spotify. For 25 bucks a year, you can get access to your entire music library from any of your iOS devices anywhere in the world, as long as you have network access. When you set up iTunes Match, iTunes will compare your library with Apple’s iTunes Store and match any song that you have that appears in their catalog. Any tracks that Apple doesn’t have will be uploaded to the iCloud servers for you to access. For most people, there won’t be much that you’ll need to upload unless your collection is filled with very obscure artists. Apple’s iTunes Store has over 20 million songs, so chances are your music is in there. I have just under 23,000 tracks in my library, and around 6,000 of those tracks were not in the iTunes store. It took a long time to sync my library: it took nearly three days for it to finally match and upload everything. Since then I’ve been able to access every track I have on both my iPhone and my iPad, no matter my location; my phone would even get the songs from a 3G network (luckily I’m still on an unlimited data plan). The sound quality is good, however it can take a couple of seconds for each song to begin as it needs to buffer. You do have the option to download songs or entire albums to your device from the cloud. I haven’t had to do this yet, so I can’t comment on it.
Depending on your collection, your devices and whether or not you want to drop $25 a year on the service, it may or may not be useful to you. For me, I have a huge music collection that won’t all fit on my devices, so this is pretty useful. I’m sure there will be bugs with the system that haven’t shown up yet, but knowing Apple they’ll be fixed relatively quickly. I think that this service is going to be pretty cool, and for $25 it’s a steal, especially when Apple is now storing 20-30GB of my songs for that price. While it’s not a backup of your music, it’s nice having easy access to the entire library.
iTunes Match is included in iTunes 10.5.1, which was released last week. You can access the update via Software Update in the Apple menu or download it directly from Apple’s Support site.