Apple iCloud online service, which was recently unveiled at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, will not be available until this fall, but it is already being described as revolutionary.

Apple iCloud will cover email, contacts, photos, calendar, apps and iWork documents. The first 5GB of storage will be free, while for non-iTunes music users will have to pay $24.99 to reap the benefits of a matching service.

The iTunes Match service will identify and index songs on the hard drive of a user, match those songs in a library of 18 million songs available via iTunes, and add those songs to the user’s iCloud account.

The music industry will pocket from the industry when subscribers will buy music from iTunes. But it may be noted here that Apple itself admits that merely 3 per cent of the music stored in the average iTunes subscriber’s digital library was bought from the Apple music store.

Apple’s new service will provide the music industry with some payment for the huge number of music files that were acquired via P2P services over the years. Thus, the service will benefit multiple levels of the industry.