Apple unveil iCloud

Apple has confirmed that they are to unveil the long awaited ‘iCloud’ service during a keynote address at their Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco on June 6.

The technology giant issued an advance press release detailing that Apple executives will officially announce the cloud based service alongside Lion, the eighth major release of their operating software and the next version of their mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, though speculation is rising that an iPhone 5 will also be detailed at the event.

Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs is expected to lead the launch and the Wall Street Journal is today reporting that the ‘big four’ major labels, including Universal Music have signed up to the service, making it the first cloud service connected to the industry. As previously reported, the digital lockers launched by Google and Amazon are currently operating without any content licences in place, with negotiations between Google and various labels breaking down. There has been no news regarding independent labels becoming signed up to iCloud at launch or in fact as to if any publishing companies have agreed terms with Apple yet.

There are concerns throughout the industry that cloud locker services are essentially providing a comparable experience to streaming sites such as Spotify yet circumventing the channels of paying a similar amount of royalties to artists and there are still question marks over the legality of digital lockers operating with no licensing agreement in place, though the regular counter-argument to this is that users are simply purchasing hard disk space. It will be interesting to see what Apple will bring to the table and what they have done to bring all majors on-board at this stage so stay tuned to The Gen for updates from the conference on June 6.