iTunes Match Rolling out Internationally

Despite claiming that iTunes Match wouldn’t leave the US until next year, Apple has apparently managed to eke out a deal more quickly than expected. iTunes Match started rolling out to British citizens yesterday.

iTunes Match is Apple’s killer music matching service: take a recording of music, feed it into Apple’s backend and the service will automatically tag that song as being in your library. The remarkable thing is, it doesn’t matter where the music came from. If you feed Match a song downloaded from a Bit Torrent tracker, it will still match it and say you own it, essentially legitimizing your stolen copy.

How Apple managed to get recording studios to agree to that is beyond my comprehension. iTunes Match is part of Apple’s iCloud offering, a paid service designed to make your digital life easier. While many of its services are already trumped by Google’s (free) offerings, iTunes Match is a truly unique feature that no other cloud-based service provider can currently match.

It will still be a while before the service rolls out to the entire planet. Outside of a few European Union countries, deals still need to be struck. Still, this marks a major turning point for the service, getting it into the hands of millions more people.

Photo by : Apple