Don’t invest in iTunes Match unless you have mainstream tastes in music and a small library

I wouldn’t say I had that esoteric a taste in music, but by Apple’s standards I clearly do. Like many people I signed up for iTunes Match when it was released because I fancied having my music in the cloud for ready access. However what I didn’t fully appreciate is that the iTunes store is a very vanilla, very mainstream affair and unless your music collection is equally mainstream, you’re going to be doing a lot of uploading.

The majority of my collection is electronic music of one kind or another. I was a DJ for a good portion of my adult life and therefore have a lot of tracks that probably won’t appear on some top 40 compilation. That said I’m not into nosebleed ragga accordian rave music – there’s only a few totally left-field tracks in my collection. And yet of the 19509 items in my iTunes library a full 7564 of them need to be uploaded to Apple before I can access them in my iCloud library. Assuming a relatively frugal size of 8Mb per track that means Apple want me to upload over 60Gb of music to their servers. Since my ISP counts uploads as well as downloads against my bandwidth, that leaves me in a bit of a bind – I really don’t want to be squandering so much of my monthly allowance on this and yet, if I want the music there, I have no other option.

Would really like to know if it’s just me. How many tracks are Apple asking you to upload to your iCloud? Do you plan on letting Cupertino hoover up all those esoteric songs of yours? Also – if the songs I’m uploading are being transferred because Apple doesn’t have them in its 18million strong collection – how are they going to magically transform them into high quality 256Kb versions since I’m the source and I don’t have them in 256Kb? Hmmm?