Customers are reporting seeing iTunes Match references in the Settings app of iOS 5, which has led many people to believe the service will soon go live. More specifically, a toggle to turn iTunes Match has appeared in the Music settings in the Settings app. When I went to check this out on my iPhone 4, I initially didn’t see anything about iTunes Match. However, after a few moments a toggle appeared at the top of the screen to turn the music-matching service on.

iTunes Match is already available for developers and, as a whole, it has been getting positive feedback. Its expected to go live for the general public (in the US, anyway) very soon. For those that don’t know, iTunes Match is a service that matches any song in iTunes with a version in the cloud for use with iCloud. According to Apple:

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. Since there are more than 20 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. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-freequality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

For those interested, iTunes Match will run you $24.99 a year which, depending on how many songs you “match,” could be an amazing deal.

Personally, I don’t plan on using the service, but I’m sure many people are very excited about it. When iTunes Match does go live, will you subscribe? Comment below or tweet me here!

Via: MacRumors