It's the End of the World As We Know It
According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is indeed looking to incorporate Lala into iTunes. This fusion could create a new iTunes store with new rules and usage rights.
According to the article, The proposed changes would represent a fundamental redefinition of what it means to own a song, movie or other piece of media—shifting the emphasis from possession of a physical disc or digital file to the right to access content.
This is where the heads start butting. Mac users have become fond of the idea of music ownership. Few "music rental" streaming services have been offerd to Mac users and those that were could not compete with iTunes. Mac users are weary, having seen the collapse of giants like MTV & Microsoft's URGE venture which left many users back at zero. What guarantee can Apple provide that it will not flouder and fail and leave its users without a music library? What if another label or individual buys the rights to a musi catalog and changes the terms, will iTunes users have to pay more for songs they already had rights to stream? But then again, the upside is something Mac users have never truly experienced – access to a music catalog from anywhere at any time. iPods and iPhones have no streaming capabilities and therefore have a limited storage capacity. New video recording capabilities on the iPod nano and iPhone storage can quickly eat into the precious storage of these small devices.
We've all come to expect a certain level of form and function from Apple. But can we expect this to new in-the-cloud reboot of iTunes to be more of a blessing than a curse? It is not entirely Apple's call, this move relies heavily on the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, two very powerful organizations computer users love to hate.