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If you were thinking that Apple had nothing to rival Google Music with, think again. Because iTunes Match is here which allows you to store music in the cloud and access it anywhere. You can access it from any device through iTunes.

Apple has finally launched cloud service to store your music. While Google launched Google Music recently which allows you to upload music in it’s cloud and then access it from anywhere, Apple’s iTunes formerly allowed you to store only that music in the cloud which you had purchased from iTunes.

iTunes Match – the cloud storage for Apple users:
This is how it works: you simply tell iTunes about the music that you want to be included in the iCloud. If that music is already available in iTunes’ 20 million songs collection, it automatically adds that music from the store to your cloud. However, if the music isn’t there, you can simply upload the music to the store. And then if a high-quality version of that song becomes available on iTunes, it automatically streams that for you, even if you had uploaded a very low-quality version. The song quality Apple claims to provide through iTunes Match is 256 kbps AAC DRM.

Google has provided the feature of uploading music into the cloud and then accessing it from anywhere, for free for the US users. But Apple, for now, is charging an annual fee of $24.99 to let you upload music to iCloud and then access it. However, in case of Apple users, only such users will be able to avail iTunes Match service who have iTunes 10.5.1 or later installed or those who access the service through a device which runs iOS 5.0.1 or later.