Apple unveiled their new cloud computing service, iCloud, on June 6, 2011 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. The service stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents and more and automatically pushes them to all of your devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc). It wirelessly allows users to manage content and keeps email, contacts, and calendars up to date across all devices, eliminating the need to synch or manage content.

iCloud is free for up to 5 gigabytes of music downloaded via iTunes. This free service will scan and match users’ current music collections for music carried by the iTunes store, and then make it available to all of the users’ devices.

How can iCloud change the music industry? Because it will also offer iTunes Match this fall, which will allow music fans to reproduce their entire digital collections on servers accessible via 10 devices. For an annual charge of $24.99, iTunes Match stores your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs, purchased somewhere other than iTunes or downloaded illegally. The service will also allow storage of movies, photos and other data files, in an attempt to shift consumers from physical hard-drives to Web-based storage.

This service provides a crucial new revenue stream for the record industry and can attempt to monetize/recoup losses from illegally downloaded music. It’s rumored that Apple will give the four major labels almost 60 percent of future profits, as well as about 12 percent to music publishers. Many also predict that Apple will use iCloud as a gateway to a broader subscription service, in the next few months. The broader subscription service will provide even more revenue for the music industry, and on a long-term basis.

Tell us what you think! Will you use Apple’s iCloud? As an independent artist, how will this service affect you?

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The SongCast Crew