“Industry executives tell me Apple has yet to approach the big labels for new license deals, which they say Steve Jobs and company would need if they want to run a streaming ‘locker’ service,” Kafka reports. “But Apple can do interesting things at iTunes without new label deals.”
“Apple plays its cards close to the vest even with the music labels it works with, so the people I’ve talked to are making informed guesses,” Kafka reports. “That said, music sources tell me they’re expecting a lightweight, Web-based version of the iTunes store. The new version would be designed to sync up easily with the rest of the Internet and make it much easier for customers to share their musical tastes (but not songs) with friends.”
Read more in the full article here.
Native integration with Last FM, with live over-the-air scrobbling would be a welcome addition.
That is my primary reason for jailbreaking.
http://www.last.fm/user/theconfuzed1
The prognosticators don’t have a friggin clue. Presumably if you throw out enough weird ideas something will be right and then you can say you predicted it all along. This seems to be in the weird class. Hard to believe Apple will have a full fledged event to announce a new way to share musical tastes (but not music).
Why do I want to stream my music to anywhere when I can already get my music in any location I want by merely carrying my iPod? I don’t even need an internet connection.
SubSonic already provides me an easy way to stream to my iPhone over 300+ Gigs of my music with LastFM integration – no jailbreaking needed.
@Dude
That’s antisocial. I mean, how you gonna tweet with an old fashioned iPod? In the future every device (including toilets) will be in constant contact with facebook, twitter, and the Google. [You must be one of those people that has a life, and keeps some of it to yourself.]
@Basil Ganglia
This event will be for new ipods, new itunes features will be the 2nd act. And considering everyone is trying to be Facebook nowadays…. It seems very possible that they will be adding social features to itunes…
As little as I care about streaming, I want social networking on iTunes even less. We need a Snow iTunes that strips back down to the core functionality and in an orderly, usable way adds back in the features they’ve been adding piecemeal for years.
I really don’t need yet another format win which to keep people apprised of my every move- and the world doesn’t need it, either.
Adding the functionality of BeaTunes would be great, though.
“Apple plays its cards close to the vest even with the music labels it works with, so the people I’ve talked to are making informed guesses,” Kafka reports. “That said, music sources tell me they’re expecting a lightweight, Web-based version of the iTunes store. The new version would be designed to sync up easily with the rest of the Internet and make it much easier for customers to share their musical tastes (but not songs) with friends.”
“even with the music labels”? How about, especially.
A “web-based version”? Wow, how 2002! How about just integrating those features into the mobile and desktop iTunes? I’d rather avoid the bloat, but if the kids like it…
Doesn’t really sound like a feature around which Apple would plan an event.
The iTunes Store is already “web” based, just not browser accessible. It would be trivial for Apple to add the purchasing aspect of the store to a browser… The hard part will be figuring out a way to download purchased content through a web browser and getting it onto a device. Although it just download into a downloads folder if the content is purchased on a device that doesn’t have iTunes/iPod installed.
Anything social added would probably be some kind of FaceBook integration… You purchase a song from iTunes and it automatically posts a message to your FaceBook wall along with the ability for others to listen to a preview of the song, or movie, or etc… and of course the option to purchase it.
I’d like to see a world where I can carry most of my music around with me. I had a world like that with my 60GB iPod. With my iPhone, I’m forced to have a small selection (to me–I’m a music nut) of my library. And I can’t go back to the iPod because the sound quality between the iPod and iPhone is very different. iPhone sounds much better.
Pandora helps to give me some variety. But I have a HUGE library of music and I love having random songs come on that I may have forgotten about, and I get to discover them all over again. With the iPod, I was able to do that.
There needs to be an iPhone for people with larger libraries. Even if it were bigger and clunkier, I’d buy it. I thought Lala might help, since you can stream. And right as their iPhone app was awaiting approval, Apple bought them out. Bye bye streaming, bye bye having the gift of listening to a song and album all the way through before purchasing it.
I know music freaks are in the minority, but there was a time when the top of the line iPod met all our needs. Now, with the iOS, those needs are not being met anymore. It sucks.
I don’t see how Apple needs a new license for that. I bought the music and I have the right to store it, stream it and play it form where ever I want. It’s like that stupid lawsuit against that cable company that wanted to make a DVR but in the cloude. What’s the difference if they store it or I store it? The process is the same. I record, data gets stores and I play it back. Just that the data goes over the Internet. It’s just a technicality. I think it’s stupid. It’s like I need a special license to stream my own music from my server over net to my iPod… It’s ridiculous.
I wish death to the movie and music industry and may ppl pirate them to the grave.