Now that it’s been a week, and we’ve had some time for the RDF to dissipate, I think it’s time to take a look at some of the products that Apple announced during the keynote at WWDC. Chief among them for me is iTunes Match. A lot of people have dismissed it, saying it’s not a serious competitor to Goole or Amazon, or that it won’t have a lot of takers, and others have said it’s going to be The End Of The World.

The doom-and-gloom people are idiots. iTunes Match doesn’t get you free music. It doesn’t get you tracks you don’t already have. What it does is let you get a clean copy, with correct ID3 tags and album art, and pull that down to all your devices instead of syncing it manually. If anything, it makes us more aware of the artist, as we’ll actually see the cover art and know which artist actually performed the song. (If I hear one more person refer to The Gourd’s cover of Gin and Juice as a Phish song… I’ll… sit here and write about it).

The other thing iTunes Match doesn’t do is replace the music on your computer automatically. It’s simply available in the cloud, and you can download it whenever you need to, as long as your yearly iTunes Match account is active. I’m sure there will be some people who go and load 25,000 songs into iTunes Match, and then wipe their dirty, ill-gotten collection and replace all the files with legitimate ones. So, you now have better copies of the music you already had. Great. Now, you go and share those files, and you discover that Apple embeds your AppleID in the file, even when there’s no DRM. You also gave Apple your name and home address along with your credit card information. Which means the labels know EXACTLY where to send the lawsuits.

To those who say Google or Amazon’s service is “better”… have you used all three yet? No. We’ll see what shakes out this Fall.