Apple's music in the cloud service, iTunes Match has launched officially here in the UK. As we predicted it is available for £21.99 a year through iTunes.

The service enables you to 'match' your music collection to Apple's own vast music collection on their iTunes store rather than have to upload all your music at once. Why? Well it saves you time - a lot of it in fact - compared to other Cloud based Music services such as Google Music. It also cuts down on the amount of music Apple have to store themselves.

Any tracks that iTunes doesn't match are then uploaded along with your playlists and album artwork. You can then access your entire music collection on any iDevice running iOS 5 or any PC or Mac in which you install iTunes. So if your work PC can run the latest version of iTunes you can log in with your Apple ID and see all your music. Here's the killer feature too: despite some reports you can stream your music from iTunes Match. So if you have a vast music collection like many others now, you do not have to worry about storing it away from your main computer.

The only downside is the absence of a web interface like that of Google Music, so in order to play it you must use your iOS 5 device or install iTunes. If you can do either of these though you soon start to see the benefits when you start using it. Given that Apple are now storing all your music in the Cloud, you no longer have to worry about keeping a local copy. Need to reclaim 20GB of space? Then just delete what your not listening to. The item remains in your iTunes Library but gains a Cloud logo next to it. You can then still double click on it to stream the track or choose to re-download it from iTunes.

The well trumpeted other advantage to this is that if the track has been matched successfully with iTunes, you now download an iTunes standard file. These are 256k AAC and free of any copy protection (DRM). So you can potentially upgrade your old 128 MP3 rips easily with iTunes AAC's created straight from the studio masters.

You can purchase iTunes Match through iTunes 10.5 and must be running iOS 5 to use it on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

Tunes Match could soon be launching on iTunes UK for £21.99 allowing you to legitimise your downloads for the price of 2 CD's.
Based on reports from TheNextWeb and Gizmodo UK, it seems Apple may of released the iTunes Match link on other international stores early, before realising the mistake. According to comments on their site some users managed to sign up for the service.

In fact some enterprising users have managed to prematurely sign up to Apple's music in the cloud service, iTunes Match in the UK. TheNextWeb have reported that by a cheeky 'hack' that UK users have been able to sign up for the service even though it is yet to launch on our shores.

Other curious users have attempted to trick iTunes into thinking they are in the US rather than the UK by signing out of iTunes, changing the Store to the US and then clicking on iTunes Match before signing back in.

We've tried this loophole ourselves but without luck: having clicked to purchase iTunes Match on the US store and entering our Apple ID we where greeted with 'Computer Says No' dialog box. iTunes then reverted to its homepage, but not before revealing for a few seconds that the UK price is £21.99.

Apple may of closed the sign up loophole but they have still let the price cat out of the bag. It's a price we like too as for only 2 CD's not only could you get the benefits of having all your music in the cloud, but you'll be able to upgrade all of it to 'iTunes Plus' 256k AAC tracks, all free of DRM (copy protection). Even music you've ripped yourself. This strikes us as a rather cheap way to legitimise a lot of ripped music.

Perhaps Apple have started to use the same currency converters as the rest of us.