I’m curious how services like Apple Music work. How does the music get to my library and then downloaded onto my device if I so choose? Is my phone basically reading data from apple’s servers? And how do they have so many “copies” of the songs to give to people?
In: 4
> how do they have so many “copies”
Is this a legal question or computer question? I can kinda answer both
In principle, a streaming service only needs one copy of a song. When you want to listen to it, your computer asks apple to send over the data that makes up the song.
Imagine there’s a service where you can call a phone number and they’ll read out the first page of A Tale of Two Cities to you. They only need one copy.
You call, someone answers and starts reading out “It was the best of times…” to you. A few seconds later, someone else calls and gets a different operator who begins reading it out to them. You’re hearing “it was the worst of times” at that moment though. Both operators are looking at the same page but reading independently of each other. The service can handle as many callers as they have operators, but they only need one piece of paper. If the call center gets full and they want to handle more concurrent callers, it’s only at that point that they’ll need another copy — for the new call center to use.
The analogy breaks down a bit when you examine what the caller is doing. If that book was in copyright, you probably wouldn’t be allowed to write down what you hear so you can read it later at your leisure. With computers, that’s what happens. Copyright law had to be updated to incorporate the understanding that computers need to create temporary copies of media in order to play them at all.
When you “stream” music, your computer listens to Apple telling it all the 1’s and 0’s that make up the song and writes a temporary copy of that information that you have a limited license to play as music.
You generally can’t legally take the music file and hold onto it forever, and the streaming software helps enforce that legal limitation. That way if the streaming rights for the song go away for whatever reason, the next time you go to play it it will fail.
There’s not anything significantly different going on under the hood when you buy a song and download that file that you get to keep forever. You have just bought a license that lets you use that media more liberally than a streaming service does, so the software around doesn’t need to enforce streaming service limitations
Latest Answers