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A Dream for Music, but Label's Nightmare

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THE Apple iPad, which goes on sale April 3, will access video, applications and Web sites wirelessly no cords or cables needed.

But to move your trusty old music collection onto this wonder gadget and take it with you to work, or on vacation, you'll have to pull out a U.S.B. sync cable, plug the device into your PC and transfer those music files over.

Its kind of a hassle, and it becomes worse when you buy a song on the tablet and then want to make sure its on your other devices as well. Apple could probably ditch the idea of synching altogether, if it only had the kind of Internet music service that everyone anticipates but which has not yet caught on: what techies call music in the cloud.

Such a service lets people store their music collections on the Web all those Beatles CDs and Blondie albums we ripped over the last two decades and then stream the songs to any computer, phone, tablet or the coming wave of Internet-connected radios.

The music labels themselves love the idea of bringing peoples music collections into the cloud, particularly because it might make consumers excited about buying music again. The number of people downloading digital music dipped slightly last year from 2008, according to the NPD Group.

So moving our music into the cloud and piping it to any device, on demand, should be easy, right? Actually, there could be several hurdles. But first, lets acknowledge that the very idea of music ownership may be outdated. A whole new generation of music lovers are opting to pay for unlimited jukebox in the sky subscription services like MOG and Rhapsody, which let them play any song, whenever they want, to an increasingly wide range of devices.

But if the music industry wants to preserve what is now the more profitable business, in which people actually pay for and own a copy of an individual song or album, it must first work out practical and affordable licensing terms with tech companies that want to develop cloud music services.

Michael Robertson, an online music entrepreneur, says he doesn't believe that such economical licensing agreements are possible. In 2000, his former company MP3.com opened a service to let people play any song on the Web if they could prove they owned it. The site, which settled lawsuits brought by major record labels, was eventually acquired by Vivendi Universal.

Music companies want consumers to pay more, Mr. Robertson said. They consider a copy in the cloud, played multiple times, to essentially be a song that has been bought multiple times.

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