Little Apples in the air

Apple, agree people who watch the company obsessively, are about to launch their music streaming service (possibly with all four members of the RIAA cartel on board). They've been thinking about it for a long time, claims patently Apple:

In some embodiments, the electronic device could remotely connect to the user's library. In some embodiments, the electronic device could instead or in addition connect to a content source such as (e.g., a content generator or a content point of sale – which could be associated with Apple's iTunes and others like Amazon) to stream the media items. To ensure that devices could only stream media items that the user has purchased or to which the user otherwise has legal access, the content source could require an authentication scheme (e.g., a username and password, or a secure token). In some embodiments, the streamed media items could instead or in addition include missing elements that an electronic device must retrieve and locally store from the user's media library (e.g., remove 3 seconds of every 10 seconds of a media item, such that the missing 3 seconds are retrieved and locally stored on the device from a user's media library).

And to think there were people who thought that compact discs were over-sciencifying listening to songs.

Amazon and Google will mention that Apple aren't the first to market. But then again, the iPod wasn't the first mp3 player to market.