Hasta La Gadget!

Apple is planning an announcement Tuesday morning regarding iTunes.

Count us among the cautiously optimistic. ITunes is one of the most successful software packages in history, installed on more than 125 million computers worldwide and used for about 70 percent of all digital-music purchases. (Exact numbers are hard to find, but it’s huge.) Its reach would seem to make iTunes a terrific platform for transforming the media landscape — if it weren’t such a bloated, hard-to-use, overloaded mess.

We don’t know what Apple will be announcing Tuesday morning (7 a.m. Pacific/10 a.m. Eastern). The Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the situation,” says it will include the long-awaited coming of the Beatles catalog to the iTunes Music Store. It could be the addition of a streaming-media subscription service to iTunes. It might be an overhaul of Apple’s abortive attempt at a social network, Ping. Or it could be something completely different.

Regardless of what Apple does announce, here’s what we’re hoping for.

Subscription Music

Already iTunes lets you rent TV shows. The company is building a billion-dollar, 500,000-square-foot data center, and has yet to do anything really interesting with LaLa, the streaming-music startup it acquired in late 2009 and shut down earlier this year. Isn’t it about time that Apple offered an all-you-can-eat subscription music service, similar to Rdio or Spotify or Rhapsody, that lets you listen to whatever you want?

It’s surprising the company hasn’t already done this (and a little bit embarrassing to us, given the number of times we’ve called for this). Still, if we were going to put our money on a bet about tomorrow’s announcement, it’d be this: The signs all point toward an imminent subscription streaming-music service. If it doesn’t happen this week, it’ll happen soon. We hope.

Make It a Cloud-Based Service

“Cloud” services are this year’s hot marketing trend, but for a good reason. Saying that a service lives “in the cloud” is shorthand for saying that it’s stored on a server somewhere out there in the internet, and don’t you trouble your pretty little head about where or how. It’s the internet equivalent of “and then a miracle occurs.”

But with an increasing amount of our lives lived through portable gadgets, cloud services meet a need: Letting us get to our stuff from wherever its, wherever we are, no matter what device we’re using.

And that billion-dollar data center? Once you’re using it to deliver subscription music, why not let it deliver all of a customer’s music library?

In other words, to hell with syncing. We want our iTunes music streamed to us in real time — on our phones, tablets, notebooks, netbooks and work computers.

And there are millions of us who would pay for a service like that.

Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

It’s not like The Beatles are lacking in legacy and cultural saturation, but we have to lament the generation of kids that have yet to hear the Fab Four in album form — at least, in legally-obtained album form — thanks to the group’s conspicuous absence from the largest music retailer in the US . Now, a mere seven and a half years after Apple launched the iTunes store, with countless hopeful rumors in-between, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that The Beatles catalog is a lock for tomorrow’s iTunes announcement. This is according to WSJ‘s “people familiar with the matter,” and matches with what Billboard calls “the best bet” from what it’s managed to scrounge up. Even with such an imminent announcement, WSJ‘s sources warn that plans could change at the last minute, and that the talks between Apple, Beatles reps, and EMI were taking place as recently as last week. Still, we just have to believe this is going to happen, cross our fingers, and wear our lucky socks tomorrow — because really, who wants to wait another seven years?

WSJ: Apple bringing Beatles to iTunes after a seven year wait originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s a big ol’ iTunes announcement coming tomorrow! Apple didn’t leave us many clues as to what we can expect, but here are a few things that we definitely want. And we might even get a few of them. More »

If you head to Apple’s US homepage, you’ll be greeted with this very special splash page: the company’s got an iTunes-related announcement tomorrow morning at 10EST time. But what could it be? Updated: More »

We’ve already got the Mac OS X update, and here’s iTunes 10.1. Next stop? iOS 4.2. If your copy of iTunes isn’t pushing the update, you can head to Apple’s page where it’ll be there, waiting for you. In addition to paving way for the new iOS, iTunes 10.1 adds the much anticipated video AirPlay feature (it launched as audio only), so fire up that Apple TV and push yourself some vids!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

iTunes 10.1 is out, brings video AirPlay and iOS 4.2 compatibility originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 13:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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