Four Big Music Labels Look For Apple's Music Service To Launch At WWDC

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Normally when we hear news about Apple, we hear it from tech insiders, or similar folks place to know. But this particular piece of Apple news comes from the four big record labels–Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal–who are looking for Apple to launch its big cloud music service at Apple’s big WWDC.

We all know that the Apple WWDC was the hot ticket in town for quite some time. We saw the eBay auctions fire up in earnest with extra tickets going for big cash. And it’s generally accepted that there will be a ton of news to come flooding out of this thing.

The record labels in question, however, will be watching just as hard as we are, because they’re expecting to see Apple fire up its cloud music service. Apparently, Amazon and Google’s offerings have proven somewhat, well, distasteful for the record labels, as those two aren’t paying “licensing fees” on the so-called “music locker” services, which allow users to upload songs to cloud storage. The big problem there is actually twofold: the labels think that users would be able to upload illegally-obtained songs to cloud storage, and also Google is changing some uploaded items to a different format, which could be considered making a copy, which is technically illegal in its own right under some circumstances bearing in mind that I’m not a lawyer.

But the labels are hoping for Apple’s launch, which at this point seems to be fully sanctioned by said labels, complete with fees and fines and penalties and every single dotted i and crossed t they could hope for.

Since, at last report, the WWDC will be heavy on the software, there’s a good chance it may show up. But if it doesn’t, the labels will have to wait a pretty good while for another opportunity to see their service of choice let loose. And that would be a problem for the labels, as if Amazon and Google’s services, that leave the record companies largely out in the cold, prove good enough for most, there will be no reason to upgrade, and ice them out of a substantial chunk of business.

You know we’ll be watching the WWDC closely to see what comes out of it, so keep it here to see if the record companies get their way.