Apple’s much anticipated spotify rival has finally arrived two weeks after its scheduled date for US subscriber sot enjoy.

Unfortunately for UK music lovers it seems that Apple are no closer to a date for launch but it is likely to be fairly soon once legal agreements have been sorted between publisher and owners of content.

What is iTunes match?

With MP3’s being a pretty poor approximation of a high quality CD music track, progress was always going to move toward bringing the high fidelity of a CD to the compressed version that we all love due to its very small size.

What iTunes match will do is take your existing (and sometimes dubious) record collection and then do two things:

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• 1 – Replace all your tracks with a cloud based high quality track to stream at your leisure from the iTunes cloud.
• 2 – Legitimise the tracks that you may or may not have bought through iTunes or from your own CD’s.

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How can you stream your content?

The iTunes match service will run on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV, Mac and PC devices, so you will be able to stream or download the tracks in your collection without having to manually sync to iTunes.

iTunes match cost?

Coming in at $24.99 for a full year the service seems quite reasonably priced especially if you have literally tens of thousands of tracks. For this you will get your entire collection offered to you via a 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free format with vastly improved quality over compressed MP3’s

In the process your music collection will also be “legitimised” even if you perhaps were not the true owner all along, this no doubt is why the UK music industry is taking so long to agree to terms.

If your track can not be found in the 20 million library at iTunes, then the technology will simply upload your existing track and use that.

It is not fair to compare the service to spotify as the iTunes service means you have to actually own the music in the first place, and is about quality not quantity, but it is reasonably priced and for what it offers (easy access to your tunes in a much more improved quality) it seems to be quite a fair price.

Google music beset by slow uploads:

With Google offering something close to iTunes match we wonder if Apple will ensure that speeds are better when uploading tracks than the poorly received Google music technology which is currently free and in Beta.

With around 20 million users in France alone, Deezer has finally decided to take its technology over the water based channel and into a brand new audience audio channel.

It is easy to forget that non English speaking countries have some fantastic competing software, and technology for social networking and in Deezer’s case listening to music. So it is a welcome sight to see a non US and UK based service being released on the back of strong foreign domestic support.

The Parisian music streaming service called Deezer is set to launch in the UK in September, with premium packages starting at £4.99 a month.

Deezer pricing:

The basic “Discovery mode” is completely free as a service and allows users to listen to on-demand music with 30 second clips and full radio stations of their choice on Deezer for free…very much like LastFM.

Premium packages are an option and include:

“Premium” which costs £4.99 per month and will offer unlimited streaming on PC and Mac with enhanced sound quality.

And a more upmarket version called “Premium +” which adds mobile streaming and offline playback for £9.99 a month.

Deezer functionality:

Deezer will be available on PC and Mac, as well as smartphones, mobile phones, tablets, IP TVs and clever sound systems such as the Logitech Squeezebox and Sonos.

A slightly more unique service is something that the team at Deezer call “disc-overy” which is a human edited recommendation tool providing editorial content and suggestions to its users based on their habits and likes.

Mark Foster, managing director of Deezer UK, said:

“We’re extremely excited to be launching Deezer here in the UK. With easy access everywhere music fans will be able to enjoy music anywhere they like, at any time, and be able to share their music with their friends, easily and legally.”

Being a hybrid between spotify and last.fm sounds great but we have heard that they have a tendency to play rather a little too much French rap which if you like is this genre is not a bad thing but it is a bit early 2000’s for my ears!

Too late or the masses?

Limited Beta initially:

The service will initially be open to a few invites on a beta release to iron out potential issues if you want an invite go to this link here:

Pre-registering seems the best option and the one to bring you the quickest results in getting a working account.

Once you are accepted and things are working as they should, you will be able to access 15 million songs, these will all be totally free with advertisements making up the revenue on the basic accounts, subscription services will start at $5 a month with no ads, and a $10 a month option will include streaming to mobile and slightly higher quality audio by virtue of larger bit rates being offered while streaming the audio files.

Native spotify application is fantastic

Users in the US will no doubt be unaware in the main that the fantastic native application for Mac and Windows is a seriously well designed bit of kit and users will no doubt enjoy the experience of getting knee deep in the beats with their new found toy!

Let us know what you think when your in, we are sure you will love it!

Techcrunch are reporting that the unlimited spotify plan will cost around $4.99 a month.

Spotify US version will cost more then the European equivalent?

Whereas the premium service will cost $9.99 a month; this will allow access to mobile music (using your smart phone or tablet to access spotify via an application) plus off-line access or through a music system such as Spotify’s brother in beats, Sonos.

Is this fair?

Well lets do some calculations:

US version

Unlimited Plan:

$4.99 = £3.13

Premium Plan:

$9.99 = £6.26

UK version

Unlimited Plan:

£4.99 – (an extra £22 a year)

Premium Plan:

£9.99 – (an extra £45 a year)

While nit-picking about small fractions of prices seems a bit crass, the truth is the Premium plan difference compared to the US is 1/12 of an average UK smartphone contract per year….i.e one months bill.

The McIndex replaced by the Spotify Screw:

We all know the US is seriously in a mess so could the much vaunted “McIndex” now be replaced by the “Spotify Screwing”?

Yes, it would appear that Spotify’s accounts team could know a little more than we do about the expendable income of your “average Joe”, and have priced accordingly.

Facebook Collaboration?

With news that Facebook have something “BIG” up their sleeves, many listening closely to the technological grapevine belied that a collaboration is in place and the final deals have yet to be sorted, causing the slight delay in the release of an official US Spotify.

Will the prices be as quoted above?

Spotify says:

“No details are set for the pricing or details of our US service yet – we’re still testing a number of different options. We’ll be sure to let you know when we have something to announce.”

Do you think a price fluctuation such as the one detailed above is fair? Or, do you think that mobile bill payers already pay too much in the UK/Europe and deserve a balancing up of costs in light of their investment so far?