Make Music, Not War.

     Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple Inc., announced Apple's latest and greatest innovation: the iCloud. The new "cloud" allows users to wirelessly access apps, files, media and email- on various devices, via the internet... automatically.  The aim? Jobs says today's launch was developed with one purpose: "to move the center of your digital life into the cloud."

     As a MobileMe account holder, this sounded great to me at first: all the perks of my current account, but $75 less a year! As I read on, the deal got sweeter. Along with the services that I was used to and some other new cool bonuses, Apple has once again figured out a way of staying ahead of the game with the iCloud's iTunes "Match" app.

     The "Match" app is revolutionary because it allows users to upload all their music into the iCloud, whether pirated or purchased on iTunes. The app will automatically (and in a matter of minutes) match all your songs, pirated or purchased, to the songs in the iTunes store and add them to your library automatically. The only potential drawback being for those who don't want to pay $25, which is the only way to keep your library available.

     This move, according to TuneCore CEO and founder Jeff Price, will monetize piracy and revolutionize the music industry. “This puts together a model that allows people to make money off of pirated music,” says Price, “The gap between those two things have never been bridged before - the needs of the consumer and the rights holders.”

     But, why is this so important? Since the popularity of Napster around 2000, one of the biggest conflicts of the digital age, music piracy skyrocketed. Developments like this led the ‘big five’ music publishers to completely rethink their business (Shirky, 2001), while still fighting back in the war against piracy by avidly suing file-sharing websites. Ironically, during their fight to stay alive, many music publishers (like Time Warner with Gnutella) found themselves getting their own hands dirty in the file-sharing community.

     The fight wasn’t just between those stealing and those producing the music, though. While piracy became increasingly popular, the IT industry kept coming up with the best technology to illegally reproduce the pirated media- allowing the vicious cycle to continue. The early convergence strategies that alluded to perfect competition in a global marketplace began to veer the ugly face of reality: that the Internet isn’t as easily controlled as we once imagined.

     Media’s convergence opened Pandora’s box; it was only a matter of time before the opportunity was exploited by rapidly advancing technologies to feed the greedy public’s mouths (and ears, in this case). Today, Apple gave a glimmer of hope back to media producers by creating a system that could potentially change the way media consumers’ access music. Though all that glimmers is not gold, will media consumers' adoption of streaming save the music industry’s conflict in the digital age? Only time will tell.