Earlier this year, I wrote something about how I thought that Apple could offer streaming music through iTunes. Could this be something that they are moving towards?

Spotify has been getting a fair amount of attention this year, while Last.fm has a considerable userbase, creating two ways of "socialising" music; an inherently social product. The key being that they each make it easy to legally share music by sharing links to the music online legally, rather than sharing (and copying) the actual music.

Apple are in a position where they could combine the iTunes/iPod/iPhone network of devices to create a service which would let you download a track for free, and limit the number of times you could listen to it, creating a "try before you buy" model.

With the iPhone (and iPod Touch), peer-to-peer networking has been included in the iPhone 3.0 software. This could enable music could be shared over wifi or Bluetooth between users/devices- say, I buy a song, And I send my friend a copy which he can listen to X times for free, before buying it if he wants to listen to it more.

With Genius, Apple already has a way of tracking what people listen to and recommend new songs they don't have. This could take the next step and send you the music that is recommended for you, so every purchase you make through iTunes improves the recommendation engine (in a way that MP3s from, say, Amazon wouldn't.) This would give you a reason to keep using iTunes which in turn would give you a reason to stay with the iPod/iPhone family of devices when the time came to upgrade.

This theory of mine is partly an "I would like it if…" bit of thinking, but also partly a look at what they have been doing to the iPod/iTunes platform over the last few years. iTunes has never been a massive source of revenue for Apple— it was always more about selling iPods than about selling music. But now that the iPod family includes the iPhone and iPod Touch, the idea of making the most of the networking capabilities seems an obvious one to take advantage of. The Genius recommendation engine, the straight-to-device download ability, and now the ability to connect devices to one another without being on the same WiFi network all seems to be heading in the same direction.

For Apple to do that, they would have to be set up to deliver a lot more data than they do through just selling music, for starters; from a purely technical point of view (as there would be more listening than there is buying.) So one indication that Apple were doing this might be the news that they were significantly expanding their data centres' capabilities.

Well, you can probably see why it caught my attention when a Wired magazine article this month reported a story about Apple's secret new data centre; 500,000 square feet of... well, something. Naturally, this being Apple, we know very little about what is going to fill those 500,000 square feet. Is it going to focus on, data processing, data storage- we don't know.

"Cloud computing" doesn't seem to make much sense for Apple. Their Macs are pretty powerful machines, come packaged with a pretty decent set of software, and are mainly used by home rather than work users, so the benefit of Apple competing with something like Google Documents seems to be of fairly little value to a Mac user (I would think.)

The iPhone could benefit from an online service that takes some of the weight off it's shoulders for processor-intensive tasks, but given that the Applications platform has done pretty well in demonstrating what a handheld computer with a reasonable amount of power can do, cloud computing doesn't seem to be as obvious a fit as, say, Windows Mobile allowing access to Office software online. I can't imagine anyone doing video editing on their phone that goes beyond what the 3Gs can already deal with.

Given the friction between Apple and the major music labels, it would probably be difficult for Apple to negotiate a deal which helps maintain their dominant position of music downloads. But on the other hand, an integration of Last.fm with iTunes could have the same effect— combining the functionality of the Last.fm iPhone application with the iPod/iPhone function, and with the "radio" section of iTunes (which to me feels like something that never moved on from what RealPlayer and Windows Media Player were doing 10 years ago— with no way to move quickly and easily from discovering music I like to buying/owning it.)

(It could just as well be another partner— but with Rhapsody and Spotify applications still in the queue, I think Last with their year-old iPhone app may have an edge.)

That's not even touching on some of the things that could be done with other media partnerships— have a play with the FoxyTunes Firefox plugin to get an idea of what else can happen when iTunes starts integrating with other web services.)

Apple have an "event" every January and September where they talk about their new products— for the last few years, the September event has revolved around music, iPods and MacBooks. So perhaps we will be hearing something soon?