Apple Hints At Mystery iTunes Announcement

Apple is planning an iTunes-related announcement for the morning of Tuesday, 16 November, with an enigmatic message on its corporate website (“Tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget.”) predictably triggering massive speculation across the blogosphere.

According to Apple’s website, the announcement is set for 7 A.M. PST, 10 A.M. EST, 3 P.M. in London, and midnight in Tokyo.

Cloud-based streaming service?

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster suggested in a 15 November research note that Apple is planning a cloud-based service for streaming multimedia content via iTunes. “Apple is developing a data centre in Maiden, North Carolina that we believe could serve as the hub for such a service,” he wrote, according to the blog Apple Insider. “The company has indicated that the data centre is on track to be completed by the end of [2010] and it will begin using it then.”

Munster added that a streaming service would “leverage” Apple’s growing family of mobile devices, as well as the new Apple TV. Streaming music is currently unavailable on iTunes, although rival services – including Microsoft’s Zune Pass – offer some form of it for a set price.

Other blogosphere chatter offers up the possibility of the Beatles’ song catalog finally appearing on iTunes. If so, Paul McCartney’s Twitter feed is mum on the possibility. The Beatles’ availability on iTunes, of course, would spark the question of how many different formats of “Abbey Road” or the “White Album” a fan can possibly purchase in a single lifetime.

On 15 November, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had indeed secured the rights to the Beatles’ music, quoting unnamed “people familiar with the situation”.

In December 2009, Apple acquired Lala Media, which hosted an online streaming music service, and rumours quickly erupted that it planned incorporate the smaller company’s technology into iTunes. Lala and Apple executives remained tight-lipped about future plans, and Apple shut the service down in May.

Streaming platform

Lala allowed users to stream a particular song as many times as they liked, in exchange for a mere 10 cents. Additionally, users could purchase and download songs and albums from the company’s website.

Lala Media had formerly found itself a chess piece in a brief game of acquisitions between Apple and Google. The search-engine giant first attempted to purchase the music service, before Apple stepped in with an $85 million (£53m) offer. Google’s tit-for-tat response was to shell out $750m for mobile display ad company AdMob, on which Apple also had its eye.

Ever since, pundits and analysts have wondered how Apple could choose to deploy Lala’s assets in a new configuration. On 1 September, Apple introduced Ping, a social-networking service that allows the 160 million iTunes users to share their opinions on music and artists. Despite a collapse in talks that would have allowed users to seed Ping with their Facebook contacts, Ping users can now use their Twitter account to follow additional Ping users.