Apple is well known for their both famous and infamous Music client – iTunes. It’s famous because it’s entirely successful and well known, but infamous because so many people hate that it is the only tool we can use with our iOS devices.
iTunes allows us to keep libraries of our media including music, videos, ringtones, applications, and more; however, this is just the one weakness of iTunes, as it requires you have a storage space-snatching library. Third party services such as Spotify, Grooveshark, and Pandora have all helped to bypass this problem, by letting us stream music instead of having to download it to listen to it. They have become increasingly popular among users and even have their own App Store applications (Grooveshark is available in Cydia), which are free.
Fortunately, a new report by the Wall Street Journal shines light on Apple’s intentions to begin a music-streaming service that may function just like these popular third party music-streaming clients. The idea behind the project being that it’s convenient to use, uses less storage space, and offers a huge database of music on the fly. With the huge popularity of streaming music over the Internet, it's about time that Apple got with the picture.
There is no word yet on whether Apple will charge to use the service or offer it for free to all users. If it were free, there is a good chance that like Pandora, users would have to listen to ads or be limited with music skipping. If the service is paid, users may be able to skip through all the music they wish and not have to listen to any ads, similarly to Spotify’s service.
It sure will be interesting to see if Apple comes out with a new application for the feature or if they will integrate it into iTunes; this would limit the feature to iOS devices, Mac computers, and possibly Windows machines. Apple is still currently in talks about the idea with record companies so the project may be a long way off, but expect more news on the matter in the near future.
Sources: Wall Street Journal via MacRumors
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