Apple pays $100m in advances

THE PRICE OF STORAGE: Apple will fork over $100-150m in advances to the Big Four in order to get its iCloud off the ground, three separate sources told the N.Y. Post. The tech giant has agreed to pay the labels between $25-50m each, as an incentive to get on board, depending on how many tracks consumers are storing. The size of the advance payments has been a major hold-up for Google (see item below), which had been negotiating with the majors and now will likely have to pony up higher fees to get a rival cloud service into action. A Google cloud service could now be in the offing as soon as September, sources familiar with the talks told the paper’s Claire Atkinson. (6/3a)