Apple Launches iTunes Match Service in 19 New Countries

After the initial launch of iTunes Match service in the U.S. on November 14th 2011, followed by the launch in Canada, Europe, Australia and the U.K on December 16th 2011, Apple has launched the iTunes Match service in 19 new countries yesterday.

The new launch countries include Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Guatemala, Honduras, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

Apple had unveiled iTunes Match along with iOS 5 and iCloud at the WWDC 2011 Keynote address in June. It allows users to store their entire music collection (up to 25,000 songs), including songs that they've ripped from CDs or purchased from anywhere else in iCloud.

Here's how it works:

iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

With yesterday's roll out, it takes the number of countries where iTunes Match is available to 37 countries.

[source MacRumors]