Chicago-based soul label Numero Group has come out swinging against Apple’s iTunes Match, with co-owner Ken Shipley claiming “Apple’s pittance is an insult” to musicians, producers and songwriters. That was posted on the label’s blog after the iCloud announcement last week, but fellow co-owner Rob Sevier has been fleshing the argument out to Ars Technica. Numero’s key beef with the iTunes Match feature in iCloud is the concern that it will legitimise piracy, without providing a big enough payment. “It’s not going to be enough to matter… it’s just going to be an administrative mess dealing with all these micropayments. There’s no way it’s going to cover the hourly wage of someone working in the accounting department to even deal with.” However, he also says Numero is concerned about the spectre of mechanical royalties from iCloud copies in the future. “Right now the only thing that is binding that says this isn’t ‘replication’ is Apple’s word. We’re saying we’re not sure that just because Apple says that making this available on ten computers is OK that it’s not actually making copies… We’ve got over 50 full-length releases, and that includes a lot of publishers. If just one of them decided to stick it to us after the fact, deciding it counts as a replication, we would be on the hook for the mechanical royalties.”
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