Um. No. They didn't. The iPod was commissioned n Apple and supervised by Jobs himself in early development. Apple engineers were involved at every level with the exception of the very base operating system. The UI shell was all developed in house, the click wheel idea was brainstormed by Apple engineers, and when they…

^^^This. If it's in the iTunes library (purchased or matched), it doesn't count against your iCloud storage. At all. Ever.

And iTunes isn't missing one of the major labels, and it does the whole "match" thing instead of requiring thousands of uploads.

Yeah, but nobody had The Beatles music in the digital distribution game till Apple had it.

Well, that wouldn't be at all surprising considering that nobody got The Beatles in digital format till Apple got them in digital format. Everyone but Google has Warner.

I'm calling bullshit on your /ipod/music/F32/whatever-the-heck-it-is because that isn't at all the system iTunes uses to store music on your desktop. iTunes stores your music in the iTunes folder in a format like this: /iTunes/Music/Otis Redding/The Very Best of Otis Redding/These Arms of Mine.m4a. And that iTunes…

"4 in the morning"? Is that the new euphemism for "baked"?

So, nothing but the economy?

I'd rather have to enter my password every time that I purchase something than have someone purchase hundreds of dollars worth of media/apps when I'm not around. Besides, you enter your password, and you can buy five, six, a dozen albums all after entering the password that one time. It just times out after several…

True enough, but I do remember a number of articles about Amazon's service when it first came out, and a couple since then. I don't think they intended the lack of a mention as a slight.

Hahaha. Yeah, there is that...

And any music you match or buy from iTunes doesn't count toward the iTunes match limit either.

although, one wonderful thing about ALAC is that it was just open sourced. I'm way excited about that because I'm hoping it means a greater amount of support.

Most music (that isn't Top 40 schlock) is 99¢ on iTunes, too.

iTunes music has been DRM free for years. If you downloaded it from iTunes, you can play it back anywhere you feel like. And downloading two albums on the iPhone is no more difficult than it is on Android.

But Match and Pandora/Spotify/whatever doesn't have to be an either or option. I will never end up paying for a Spotify subscription, primarily because I feel like it's too expensive on a month to month basis, but also because I don't mind a few ads while I'm "discovering". But once I discover, I want to pay for that…

Sure, but that's only a downside in the same sense as saying "my Digital Copy isn't the same quality as my BluRay." The existence of the Digital Copy doesn't negate the existence of the BluRay (or your ability to make an MKV out of that BluRay file), but the convenience of having a Digital Copy is a handy way for…

And Amazon doesn't do the whole "Match" part of things.

So far, I know that you can stream on a desktop, and the Apple TV. I don't see a way to only stream to a mobile device, but either way, it would be sending a 256kbs AAC file's worth of information between your device and the server. In one case, once that info is sent, and then you have to have that same information…

If you double click on a track, you can stream without downloading. Or something like that. It's in an article on Macworld.