iCloud is not the Celestial Jukebox. Does that matter?

So one of the prevailing headlines after yesterday's Apple announcement is that, for $25, you can mirror pirated songs in the cloud. Bob Lefsetz, who is apparently someone with some history in the music biz, thinks Apple just totally ate everybody's lunch.

However, I'm struck by this bit:

Who in the hell is going to buy a music subscription for even $3 a month when for $25 a year you can have everything you own, even stole, at your fingertips via iCloud. That’s if you scan and match, if you bought the stuff on iTunes, it’s FREE!

Spotify, MOG, Rdio, they were just trumped by Apple. By an industry looking for short term profits unaware of the future.

For all the talk of the future, what Lefsetz is missing is that iTunes Match isn't about the future. It's about the past. What about new music? What about discovery? I'm not saying Apple hasn't thought about this, but unless the workflow ends up institutionalizing the piracy part --you continue to steal music in order to mirror it in the cloud -- this really only covers the music you already have. It's amnesty, and it just took Steve Jobs to make it happen, but you could say that about major labels and the Internet in general.

Now, it may be that the idealized notion of a "celestial jukebox" is starting to wane, but that's been the ultimate goal for a lot of efforts in online music for a long time, and it's not predicated on just having access to your stuff. It's about having access to anything, anytime, in a way that keeps you engaged, including all the new singles and new releases. If I pay Apple $25 once so I can listen to my 15,000+ tracks anywhere, might that actually keep me from caring about a record that just came out?

I don't know, actually, but to say that everyone else is dead in the water at this point seems a bit premature (admittedly par for the course for Lefsetz, but that's part of his charm, I guess). The industry still hasn't been able to figure out music discovery since it killed radio and the singles market, which means that there's an area where customers aren't getting what they need. There's still opportunity here.