Ever since Apple purchased streaming music site LaLa back in 2009 and Cupertino’s acquisition of a massive data center in North Carolina, safe money has been on iTunes moving into the cloud. But why haven’t we seen it yet?
According to an interesting rumor posted by Electronista, it all comes down to licensing.
Currently, Apple has a deal with the music industry that allows customers to stream music from their own computers to other devices, Airtunes. However, this existing licensing agreement doesn’t apply to streaming music directly from Apple’s servers, which would require an entirely new deal to be inked.
If Apple’s going to announce iTunes Live this year, it would be at September’s iPod event… but according to Electronista, many record label executives haven’t even heard of Apple’s service, which may indicate that we won’t see streaming iTunes this year at all.
[via Boy Genius Report
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
