iLounge

By Charles Starrett

Senior Editor, iLounge
Published: Friday, April 22, 2011
News Category: Apple, iTunes

Apple has already secured deals with two of the four big music labels for its upcoming cloud-based music service, according to a new report. Citing anonymous sources, AllThingsD reports that the first two deals were signed within the last two months, and that Apple’s Vice President of iTunes Eddy Cue will be in New York today to try and finalize the remaining deals. “They’ve been very aggressive and thoughtful about it,” said one industry executive. “It feels like they want to go pretty soon.” The report also states that the general idea of the service is for Apple to let customers store songs they’ve purchased from the iTunes Store, as well as other songs stored on their hard drives, for listening across multiple devices; it adds that the deals Apple is signing will let it store a single master copy of a song on its servers for sharing with multiple users, while Amazon’s service works much more like an external hard drive. The report gave no clues as to when Apple might launch the service, although prior reports have stated it could launch as early as June.