The Apple rumor mill is grinding once again -- this time churning out unfounded speculation that the company plans to roll out a streaming music service at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on June 7.
As always, these rumors could be dead-on or total hogwash. It's hard to tell the difference, because like many other companies, Apple refuses to comment on rumor, speculation or future plans. We've asked for its standard "no comment" and hope to have an update on that front soon.
On to the speculation: As the NME (Thursday) and ElectricPig (April 30) point out in their pieces, the timing of Apple's closure of Lala -- May 31, one week before Apple's June 7 WWDC event -- could very well indicate that it plans to announce a new use for Lala's code, which onlookers agree will eventually form the basis of some sort of Apple music streaming service.
A cloud-based iTunes could have the side effect of encouraging people who are perfectly happy with their traditional iPods today to upgrade to wireless-capable iPhone OS devices capable of syncing with the cloud tomorrow, which would boost Apple's profits and mobile market share significantly.
By June 7, Apple will have had over six months to rework the Lala service into a streaming version of iTunes, which it already strongly resembled anyway. Lala even includes a mechanism for pulling songs from a user's local iTunes library into a locker in the cloud. If Apple can't figure out how to port those features into iTunes in six months, either it has something far more ambitious than Lala in mind or something else -- perhaps label deals -- is holding up a cloud-based iTunes.
Still, until Apple actually announces its cloud-based streaming service, the above stories are pure speculation, so here's a nugget of solid Apple/Lala news to chew on until we know more:
Apple spokesman Jason Roth told Wired.com that on May 31, when Lala blinks offline, all of the thousands (millions? billions? We wouldn't want to speculate) of embedded Lala songs and playlists -- including those on Wired.com, Pitchfork and elsewhere -- will turn into blank space.
Hey, at least Apple isn't turning all that space into bright orange ringtone ads -- something we still can't believe MySpace had the gall to do after its imeem acquisition.
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