Yep. Not to mention the fact that the 500MB monthly download allowance in your phone contract means that you stream more than about 5 albums in a month over GPRS and your mobile phone company are going to rubbing their hands in glee and reaching for your credit card number on their files...
I've not used it but it wouldn't surprise me - with the exception of that awful ribbon idea in Office 2007, Microsoft are pretty good at GUIs and people would have laughed at them if it was they that made iTunes.
Banshee on Linux rocks but MediaMonkey is by far the best all-round music management programs I've used and is one of the good reasons for still keeping a copy of Windows XP around.
Oh yeah, and here's a BIG PROBLEM I have with iTunes - namely I wish it would LEAVE THE TAGGING IN MY MUSIC ALONE!!!!
I rip my own CDs, I do my own tagging - Banshee and MediaMonkey do not touch the tags unless I specifically use them to change stuff like artist or track name.
But iTunes writes all sorts of shit in there to the point where I gave my missus a local copy of my music drive because she uses iTunes and an iPhone.
iTunes is totally unintuitive, trying to work out how to do selective sync-ing and how to backup & restore settings is a nightmare. Plus it automatically restricts how many PCs you can install it on.
I can't comment on Amarok but Banshee kills it stone dead - I can install it on what machines I like, backing up the settings and database is straightforward, plus copying music over to devices (which can be converted on the fly from, say, FLAC to MP3) is a doddle.
My missus gave me her iPod Touch when she went to iPhone, I use an Android phone for music but use the Touch mostly for audio books. MediaMonkey blows iTunes totally out of the water for sync-ing the Touch.
I suggest you actually try them before commenting.
Android users don't need our asses wiped constantly by a big corporation. Therefore we don't use iTunes, I don't think there's even an Android client for it, is there?
12 x $4 = $48 which gets close to the price of a portable USB drive that will last at least a year and you can store your music on, carry about with you and even use when there's no Internet connection.
Why would one use iTunes in the first place when CDs are cheaper, less lossy and provide automatic backups of themselves once you rip them.
And don't reply with that standard "but there's only two good tracks on a CD" nonsense - anyone who believes that probably isn't listening to accomplished musicians capable of strapping a good whole album together, because there's plenty out there who can.
Please note that your abusive comments will be ignored, only intelligent comments will be responded to from this point forward.
Aside from the fact that Apple sells more music than any other retailer, the RIAA cannot dictate to Apple that they have to try to trap pirates.
Here's the latest stats on UK music sales, downloads account for 25% of all music sales in the UK. Based on that, I'd be very surprised if iTunes sold more music than Amazon, bearing in mund 3/4 music sales are still physical media and Apple doesn't sell CDs whilst Amazon sells loads of them.
Apple *CAN'T POSSIBLY* agree to that. That would utterly destroy Apple.
We can but hope.
Um, by definition it will be low, since you *CAN'T* buy individual tracks from a CD the way you can on iTunes. CD singles have always been priced to be a poor value. However, none of what you wrote here implies people buy CDs won't find a value in using iCloud.
I don't know why I am bothering to argue with you coherently because you clearly have a fixed viewpoint from which you will not be swayed, despite reasoning that clearly shows your viewpoint to be wrong.
I am saying, yet again, that most serious CD music buyers do not, and will not, buy downloadable music. Therefore they have no use for iCloud.
And this doesn't even make any sense. CD buyers are EXACTLY the type of people who would find value in the iCloud match feature. In fact, it is specifically targeted at them. The people who only get their music from iTunes won't have any use for this feature, and already get to use the free portion right now.
Rubbish. I have proven that most CD buyers are serious about music, therefore they don't buy downloads. Plus if they're serious about music then they rip the stuff themselves at an appropriate rate to what they want to play it on.
$25 p.a. or not, iCloud is a pointless service for the 75% of people (at least in the UK) who still buy CDs.
Do you think the labels all come to Apple and just dictate terms?
Yes. Music industry does not need Apple, Apple needs music industry.
Exactly right. Because had it been a gift then Microsoft would have been in court for passing out bribes and essentially proven themselves to be a monopoly.
Apple had BILLIONS of dollars IN CASH the day the deal between Apple and MS was settled.
Evidence, please, because Apple's own balance sheet for that year does not show that.
You are, as usual, posting from pure ignorance. Apple had BILLIONS of dollars. You are acting like Apple needed this money. They didn't.
As above, I wait for your proof of my ignorance.
What they needed was to stop warring with MS and to start making great products again, which is exactly what they did. If you think Apple wouldn't have been able to exist long enough to make Mac OS X, iMacs, MacBooks, iPods, iPhones, and iPads, were it not for the $150 million dollar purchase of AAPL that MS made, you're a fool.
I am not an economist, I would not want to try to extrapolate "what might have been" without the bailout. Besides which, it is irrelevant to my core point that states that at that moment in time, Apple were not doing Microsoft a favour, they needed the money.
I'm not picking out each and every point you've made because arguing semantics in words is going off the topic of discussion and there aren't enough hours in the day to deal with that.
The fact is that Apple will do what the music industry tells it to do because Apple making money from music sales is clearly important to Apple's business model. When you are an absolute colossus as a sales channel, like Wal-Mart in the US or Tesco here in the UK, then you have enough power and mass to dictate to your suppliers how much product you want and at what price.
iTunes is big, granted, but it is by no means the only sales channel, especially when you consider not just download sales but also physical media sellers as well. Therefore, Apple needs the music industry more than the music industry needs Apple.
With regard to those people like me who buy CDs, unless I was extremely paranoid that I would lose my CD collection through a house fire or burglary (despite having house contents insurance also), then what POSSIBLE use could iCloud have for me such that I wanted to hand over good money for the service?
Let's assume I did subscribe to that service, what's likely to happen? Presumably, I need to put each and every CD I own such that iCloud can read the ID from it in order to obtain some degree of proof that I own it. So, already, I need to put every CD I own, one-by-one, into my PC is precisely the same way that I would do if I ripped every CD myself.
Or let's look at another scenario. Let's say I've been a music lover for many years, bought lots of CDs but now buy my music as downloads. In that scenario, there *might* be a case for me bringing my entire music collection online within iCloud so that all the music I've downloaded and the CDs I bought over the years are in the same place. But then let's look at that a bit more closely...
The economics of downloadable music *ONLY* works in the first place if you are the sort of person that wants "pick n mix" music - i.e. one or two tracks from an album. If you buy the whole album as download, then the chances are it works out more expensive than buying the physical CD - and the one major reason why, as an album listener, I have no interest in the greater expense (and greater lossiness) of downloadable music.
It would be interesting to see statistics from iTunes, Amazon or whoever that show what percentage of their downloadable music sales are full albums, but I suggest the percentage is very low compared to sales of indvidual tracks because of the poorer value offered against physical CDs.
What I am leading to is the point that there are very few musicphiles out there who, as traditional CD buyers, will have reverted to downloadable music in the first place - I suggest to you, again, in the absence of statistics, that the people who buy individual tracks are those who either don't take music too seriously (and therefore bought very few CDs in the first place) or the younger generation who only recently got into music and never bought CDs.
This leads to the indisputable conclusion that a musicphile CD buyer is unlikely to have ever bought any downloadable music - therefore they've not used iTunes for music and therefore would have no use for iCloud.
No. The RIAA could also subpoena things like logs showing the IP address you logged in from and/or the account name you used.
If they then subpoena-ed the same information from the servers of a seized BitTorrent tracker site, they could tie the two together.
What they are then left with is more coherent information about you - e,g, the fact that you bought 99 Red Balloons from iTunes, then just happened to be Torrenting it shortly afterwards... or maybe that the fact you bought 10 albums from iTunes but your IP address shows you were seeding up to 20 albums, then in all likelihood you own them for 10 albums that you didn't purchase.
For as long as Microsoft has existed, Apple has put themselves in competition with Microsoft because their target demographic are people who, for whatever legitimate or silly reason, do not want to use Microsoft products.
In 1997, Microsoft was going through all the monopoly investigations and, clearly, it was in Microsoft's interest to demonstrate that there were competing products to their own. Therefore they pumped money into Apple to ensure they appeared to be viable competition.
But on the basis that Microsoft and Apple were mutually-exclusive to each other, then it would have been in Apple's best interests for its own expansion to see Microsoft reigned in as a monopoly - which would have meant not taking the $150 million in the first place.
The fact that Apple *DID* take the money suggests that they needed it very badly, and that in turn suggests that they took that money because of cashflow problems.
If you read the balance sheets of Apple in 1997, they talk about $1.2 billion in income but how much of that was used up in outgoings or used to cover losses elsewhere in the company is not clear.
Apple as a company cares a lot more about their brand image than most.
What a stupid statement! Why does Apple care more about their brand image than, say, HP or Dell? They are all out to make as much profit as possible, of course HP want someone to go back and buy a HP printer if they were happy with their HP laptop purchase.
If suddenly Apple had 90% of it's customers who uploaded pirated music being sued because of a service Apple provided - it would be bad.
That's an impossible scenario because Apple's music services are so controlled by the music industry that it could never get that bad before the music industry pulled its product from iTunes. iTunes exists purely as a sales outlet for music, there are many others and Apple has to compete to be that channel as much as anyone else does.
I'd assume that yearly fee you pay goes to the RIAA, because Apple being a hardware company cares little about software when it is driving their hardware sales.
Again, that's nonsense and it actually contradicts your first statement. If Apple cares about its brand image as much as you say it does, then it clearly relies on repeat sales to people who have bought Apple stuff before. Therefore Apple (and any other company) is going to target advertising to those people, and in order to do that it needs to collect data on those people to understand their buying habits, extract their likely yearly incomes, etc. So having someone pay a yearly subscription fee obviously goes towards covering the cost of the service but, because its a "membership" service, then Apple can tie each and every usage or purchase to a specific person - that is valuable data that can be used very effectively for targetted advertising.
Making your customers afraid to use your product for fear of being sued is *not* a stupid idea?
If you are going to constantly stalk my comments, I *DO* wish you'd at least make an attempt to read and digest them.
My core point, once again for the clearly learning impaired, is that the music industry in *DESPERATE* to sell more product due to their perception that piracy is killing their sales.
iCloud is *Apple's* product, not the music industry's product. Apple pays the industry for their product, which is licensing of the music. Why would Apple destroy their product by making their customers afraid to use it?
That's kind of the same as me saying I've just opened a butcher's shop to sell meat products but not having any suppliers for meat. iCloud exists because the music industry makes product that can utilise it.
As for making their customers afraid to use it? Where did *THAT* deduction come from? Let's get it clear, Apple *NEEDS* the music industry so it can "stock" iTunes and iCloud, not the other way around. Yes, iTunes is a big music sales channel, I'm not denying it for one minute, but so are Amazon and others.
And how iCloud "couldn't ever appeal to a CD buyer" is unclear. In fact, the $25/year add-on is specifically *designed* for CD buyers (among other groups)!
Well, I'm sorry but as a CD buyer I cannot think of a use for such a service, whether or not it's provided by Apple. Hard disks and RAID drives are cheap, in many cases ripping a CD is as simple as popping it into the PC optical drive and letting it get on with it until it spits it out. And when it's ripped, I stick the CD on a shelf as its own backup and carry about a small portable hard disk with my music on. The hard disk lets me access my music whether or not I have an Internet connection and it's not going to take many months of renting the iCloud service to exceed the cost of a portable hard disk.
Finally, the iCloud service exists only as long as I pay a rental fee and Apple provide that service. If that service discontinues, or suffers a service outage. then access to my music stops - unless I have a local copy of it in which case why would I use iCloud in the first place then?
Wow! Thanks for counting! But does that make you a stalker or a fan?
Incidentally, I have no axe to grind - I just enjoy repeating that point over and over again because it always winds up the fanbois and one always bites - I believe the term is "shooting fish in a bucket".
There is actually a very good motivation and it is not as stupid an idea as you think.
I love music but I buy CDs, I have no interest whatsoever in paying good money for downloadable music. However, I'm a very satisfied CD customer because, rightly or wrongly, the music industry perceives that it is losing vast amounts of money to piracy.
In practice, that means that the music industry has got used to lower CD sales and they now have to work hard for their money so they are doing a lot more to try to keep those us who do buy CDs to continue to do so. In my case, I'm a huge fan of hard and progressive rock from the 1970s and onwards, at this moment in time I have never had such a wealth of music to choose from because the music industry is now releasing a mass of obscure albums that never saw CD release in the first place, but are now nicely remastered with extra tracks, and at the same prices the standard pop dross comes out at.
Additionally, I'm actually rebuying some classic albums that I bought 20 or 30 years ago on CD because they, again, are being remastered with extra tracks. maybe an extra CD with some live stuff on it or even a DVD with a full concert on it from about the time the original album came out - in a strangely weird way, I can probably attribute piracy as being the reason why I get better value than ever in CDs.
The point I am coming to is that the music industry is clearly desperate to find ways to "add value" for people who do currently legally pay for music, hence something like iCloud which couldn't ever appeal to a CD buyer like me but may be of some appeal to those who buy downloaded music.
If you rob a bank at gunpoint and a bank employee has suffered mental stress or health issues as a result of you pointing a gun at him/her, then you get a custodial sentence.
I don't see what is so difficult to understand in a concept whereby damage to a "thing" is a much lesser offence than damage to a person.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Not to mention the fact that the 500MB monthly download allowance in your phone contract means that you stream more than about 5 albums in a month over GPRS and your mobile phone company are going to rubbing their hands in glee and reaching for your credit card number on their files...
Ahhh, diddums!
Your poor wittle muscly-wusclies can't cope with the extra stwain of cawwying a wittle USB dwive awound in your wittle pocket???
I've not used it but it wouldn't surprise me - with the exception of that awful ribbon idea in Office 2007, Microsoft are pretty good at GUIs and people would have laughed at them if it was they that made iTunes.
Banshee uses SQLite, not MySQL.
Agreed on both counts.
Banshee on Linux rocks but MediaMonkey is by far the best all-round music management programs I've used and is one of the good reasons for still keeping a copy of Windows XP around.
Oh yeah, and here's a BIG PROBLEM I have with iTunes - namely I wish it would LEAVE THE TAGGING IN MY MUSIC ALONE!!!!
I rip my own CDs, I do my own tagging - Banshee and MediaMonkey do not touch the tags unless I specifically use them to change stuff like artist or track name.
But iTunes writes all sorts of shit in there to the point where I gave my missus a local copy of my music drive because she uses iTunes and an iPhone.
iTunes is totally unintuitive, trying to work out how to do selective sync-ing and how to backup & restore settings is a nightmare. Plus it automatically restricts how many PCs you can install it on.
I can't comment on Amarok but Banshee kills it stone dead - I can install it on what machines I like, backing up the settings and database is straightforward, plus copying music over to devices (which can be converted on the fly from, say, FLAC to MP3) is a doddle.
My missus gave me her iPod Touch when she went to iPhone, I use an Android phone for music but use the Touch mostly for audio books. MediaMonkey blows iTunes totally out of the water for sync-ing the Touch.
I suggest you actually try them before commenting.
Android users don't need our asses wiped constantly by a big corporation. Therefore we don't use iTunes, I don't think there's even an Android client for it, is there?
12 x $4 = $48 which gets close to the price of a portable USB drive that will last at least a year and you can store your music on, carry about with you and even use when there's no Internet connection.
Why would one use iTunes in the first place when CDs are cheaper, less lossy and provide automatic backups of themselves once you rip them.
And don't reply with that standard "but there's only two good tracks on a CD" nonsense - anyone who believes that probably isn't listening to accomplished musicians capable of strapping a good whole album together, because there's plenty out there who can.
You would not need this.
You have only one ass, you have sold it to Apple and it now sits on a big shelf in Steve Jobs' office.
Please note that your abusive comments will be ignored, only intelligent comments will be responded to from this point forward.
Aside from the fact that Apple sells more music than any other retailer, the RIAA cannot dictate to Apple that they have to try to trap pirates.
Here's the latest stats on UK music sales, downloads account for 25% of all music sales in the UK. Based on that, I'd be very surprised if iTunes sold more music than Amazon, bearing in mund 3/4 music sales are still physical media and Apple doesn't sell CDs whilst Amazon sells loads of them.
Apple *CAN'T POSSIBLY* agree to that. That would utterly destroy Apple.
We can but hope.
Um, by definition it will be low, since you *CAN'T* buy individual tracks from a CD the way you can on iTunes. CD singles have always been priced to be a poor value. However, none of what you wrote here implies people buy CDs won't find a value in using iCloud.
I don't know why I am bothering to argue with you coherently because you clearly have a fixed viewpoint from which you will not be swayed, despite reasoning that clearly shows your viewpoint to be wrong.
I am saying, yet again, that most serious CD music buyers do not, and will not, buy downloadable music. Therefore they have no use for iCloud.
And this doesn't even make any sense. CD buyers are EXACTLY the type of people who would find value in the iCloud match feature. In fact, it is specifically targeted at them. The people who only get their music from iTunes won't have any use for this feature, and already get to use the free portion right now.
Rubbish. I have proven that most CD buyers are serious about music, therefore they don't buy downloads. Plus if they're serious about music then they rip the stuff themselves at an appropriate rate to what they want to play it on.
$25 p.a. or not, iCloud is a pointless service for the 75% of people (at least in the UK) who still buy CDs.
Do you think the labels all come to Apple and just dictate terms?
Yes. Music industry does not need Apple, Apple needs music industry.
I'm not denying you're hurting the company, you can even continue to call it a crime if you want.
But it's a civil issue and should not come with jail terms - human well-being far outweighs corporate well-being.
"Consolidated financial position" = earnings != profit.
I win. Again.
It wasn't a GIFT.
Exactly right. Because had it been a gift then Microsoft would have been in court for passing out bribes and essentially proven themselves to be a monopoly.
Apple had BILLIONS of dollars IN CASH the day the deal between Apple and MS was settled.
Evidence, please, because Apple's own balance sheet for that year does not show that.
You are, as usual, posting from pure ignorance. Apple had BILLIONS of dollars. You are acting like Apple needed this money. They didn't.
As above, I wait for your proof of my ignorance.
What they needed was to stop warring with MS and to start making great products again, which is exactly what they did. If you think Apple wouldn't have been able to exist long enough to make Mac OS X, iMacs, MacBooks, iPods, iPhones, and iPads, were it not for the $150 million dollar purchase of AAPL that MS made, you're a fool.
I am not an economist, I would not want to try to extrapolate "what might have been" without the bailout. Besides which, it is irrelevant to my core point that states that at that moment in time, Apple were not doing Microsoft a favour, they needed the money.
I'm not picking out each and every point you've made because arguing semantics in words is going off the topic of discussion and there aren't enough hours in the day to deal with that.
The fact is that Apple will do what the music industry tells it to do because Apple making money from music sales is clearly important to Apple's business model. When you are an absolute colossus as a sales channel, like Wal-Mart in the US or Tesco here in the UK, then you have enough power and mass to dictate to your suppliers how much product you want and at what price.
iTunes is big, granted, but it is by no means the only sales channel, especially when you consider not just download sales but also physical media sellers as well. Therefore, Apple needs the music industry more than the music industry needs Apple.
With regard to those people like me who buy CDs, unless I was extremely paranoid that I would lose my CD collection through a house fire or burglary (despite having house contents insurance also), then what POSSIBLE use could iCloud have for me such that I wanted to hand over good money for the service?
Let's assume I did subscribe to that service, what's likely to happen? Presumably, I need to put each and every CD I own such that iCloud can read the ID from it in order to obtain some degree of proof that I own it. So, already, I need to put every CD I own, one-by-one, into my PC is precisely the same way that I would do if I ripped every CD myself.
Or let's look at another scenario. Let's say I've been a music lover for many years, bought lots of CDs but now buy my music as downloads. In that scenario, there *might* be a case for me bringing my entire music collection online within iCloud so that all the music I've downloaded and the CDs I bought over the years are in the same place. But then let's look at that a bit more closely...
The economics of downloadable music *ONLY* works in the first place if you are the sort of person that wants "pick n mix" music - i.e. one or two tracks from an album. If you buy the whole album as download, then the chances are it works out more expensive than buying the physical CD - and the one major reason why, as an album listener, I have no interest in the greater expense (and greater lossiness) of downloadable music.
It would be interesting to see statistics from iTunes, Amazon or whoever that show what percentage of their downloadable music sales are full albums, but I suggest the percentage is very low compared to sales of indvidual tracks because of the poorer value offered against physical CDs.
What I am leading to is the point that there are very few musicphiles out there who, as traditional CD buyers, will have reverted to downloadable music in the first place - I suggest to you, again, in the absence of statistics, that the people who buy individual tracks are those who either don't take music too seriously (and therefore bought very few CDs in the first place) or the younger generation who only recently got into music and never bought CDs.
This leads to the indisputable conclusion that a musicphile CD buyer is unlikely to have ever bought any downloadable music - therefore they've not used iTunes for music and therefore would have no use for iCloud.
No. The RIAA could also subpoena things like logs showing the IP address you logged in from and/or the account name you used.
If they then subpoena-ed the same information from the servers of a seized BitTorrent tracker site, they could tie the two together.
What they are then left with is more coherent information about you - e,g, the fact that you bought 99 Red Balloons from iTunes, then just happened to be Torrenting it shortly afterwards... or maybe that the fact you bought 10 albums from iTunes but your IP address shows you were seeding up to 20 albums, then in all likelihood you own them for 10 albums that you didn't purchase.
It's even more basic than that.
For as long as Microsoft has existed, Apple has put themselves in competition with Microsoft because their target demographic are people who, for whatever legitimate or silly reason, do not want to use Microsoft products.
In 1997, Microsoft was going through all the monopoly investigations and, clearly, it was in Microsoft's interest to demonstrate that there were competing products to their own. Therefore they pumped money into Apple to ensure they appeared to be viable competition.
But on the basis that Microsoft and Apple were mutually-exclusive to each other, then it would have been in Apple's best interests for its own expansion to see Microsoft reigned in as a monopoly - which would have meant not taking the $150 million in the first place.
The fact that Apple *DID* take the money suggests that they needed it very badly, and that in turn suggests that they took that money because of cashflow problems.
If you read the balance sheets of Apple in 1997, they talk about $1.2 billion in income but how much of that was used up in outgoings or used to cover losses elsewhere in the company is not clear.
Apple as a company cares a lot more about their brand image than most.
What a stupid statement! Why does Apple care more about their brand image than, say, HP or Dell? They are all out to make as much profit as possible, of course HP want someone to go back and buy a HP printer if they were happy with their HP laptop purchase.
If suddenly Apple had 90% of it's customers who uploaded pirated music being sued because of a service Apple provided - it would be bad.
That's an impossible scenario because Apple's music services are so controlled by the music industry that it could never get that bad before the music industry pulled its product from iTunes. iTunes exists purely as a sales outlet for music, there are many others and Apple has to compete to be that channel as much as anyone else does.
I'd assume that yearly fee you pay goes to the RIAA, because Apple being a hardware company cares little about software when it is driving their hardware sales.
Again, that's nonsense and it actually contradicts your first statement. If Apple cares about its brand image as much as you say it does, then it clearly relies on repeat sales to people who have bought Apple stuff before. Therefore Apple (and any other company) is going to target advertising to those people, and in order to do that it needs to collect data on those people to understand their buying habits, extract their likely yearly incomes, etc. So having someone pay a yearly subscription fee obviously goes towards covering the cost of the service but, because its a "membership" service, then Apple can tie each and every usage or purchase to a specific person - that is valuable data that can be used very effectively for targetted advertising.
I could argue that getting laid regularly makes me enough of a good-humoured person to come up with such witticisms in the first place.
Making your customers afraid to use your product for fear of being sued is *not* a stupid idea?
If you are going to constantly stalk my comments, I *DO* wish you'd at least make an attempt to read and digest them.
My core point, once again for the clearly learning impaired, is that the music industry in *DESPERATE* to sell more product due to their perception that piracy is killing their sales.
iCloud is *Apple's* product, not the music industry's product. Apple pays the industry for their product, which is licensing of the music. Why would Apple destroy their product by making their customers afraid to use it?
That's kind of the same as me saying I've just opened a butcher's shop to sell meat products but not having any suppliers for meat. iCloud exists because the music industry makes product that can utilise it.
As for making their customers afraid to use it? Where did *THAT* deduction come from? Let's get it clear, Apple *NEEDS* the music industry so it can "stock" iTunes and iCloud, not the other way around. Yes, iTunes is a big music sales channel, I'm not denying it for one minute, but so are Amazon and others.
And how iCloud "couldn't ever appeal to a CD buyer" is unclear. In fact, the $25/year add-on is specifically *designed* for CD buyers (among other groups)!
Well, I'm sorry but as a CD buyer I cannot think of a use for such a service, whether or not it's provided by Apple. Hard disks and RAID drives are cheap, in many cases ripping a CD is as simple as popping it into the PC optical drive and letting it get on with it until it spits it out. And when it's ripped, I stick the CD on a shelf as its own backup and carry about a small portable hard disk with my music on. The hard disk lets me access my music whether or not I have an Internet connection and it's not going to take many months of renting the iCloud service to exceed the cost of a portable hard disk.
Finally, the iCloud service exists only as long as I pay a rental fee and Apple provide that service. If that service discontinues, or suffers a service outage. then access to my music stops - unless I have a local copy of it in which case why would I use iCloud in the first place then?
We've had this discussion before and I'm not going down that path with you again.
However:
$1 billion revenue != $1 billion profit.
Wow! Thanks for counting! But does that make you a stalker or a fan?
Incidentally, I have no axe to grind - I just enjoy repeating that point over and over again because it always winds up the fanbois and one always bites - I believe the term is "shooting fish in a bucket".
There is actually a very good motivation and it is not as stupid an idea as you think.
I love music but I buy CDs, I have no interest whatsoever in paying good money for downloadable music. However, I'm a very satisfied CD customer because, rightly or wrongly, the music industry perceives that it is losing vast amounts of money to piracy.
In practice, that means that the music industry has got used to lower CD sales and they now have to work hard for their money so they are doing a lot more to try to keep those us who do buy CDs to continue to do so. In my case, I'm a huge fan of hard and progressive rock from the 1970s and onwards, at this moment in time I have never had such a wealth of music to choose from because the music industry is now releasing a mass of obscure albums that never saw CD release in the first place, but are now nicely remastered with extra tracks, and at the same prices the standard pop dross comes out at.
Additionally, I'm actually rebuying some classic albums that I bought 20 or 30 years ago on CD because they, again, are being remastered with extra tracks. maybe an extra CD with some live stuff on it or even a DVD with a full concert on it from about the time the original album came out - in a strangely weird way, I can probably attribute piracy as being the reason why I get better value than ever in CDs.
The point I am coming to is that the music industry is clearly desperate to find ways to "add value" for people who do currently legally pay for music, hence something like iCloud which couldn't ever appeal to a CD buyer like me but may be of some appeal to those who buy downloaded music.
If you rob a bank at gunpoint and a bank employee has suffered mental stress or health issues as a result of you pointing a gun at him/her, then you get a custodial sentence.
I don't see what is so difficult to understand in a concept whereby damage to a "thing" is a much lesser offence than damage to a person.