streaming audio

Music lovers have a new option for streaming tracks on the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Pandora Premium is rolling out to all users, which means it can be added via the Pandora iOS app. The monthly subscription service offers on-demand listening features beyond the lower tier of Pandora Plus and the company's free radio. Beyond creating personalized radio stations that are ad-supported, Pandora Premium represents more competition for rivals Apple Music and Spotify.

Spotify fans, especially those who subscribe to its Premium service, can listen to music across iOS devices. But when it comes to using Spotify on Apple Watch, not so much. This is all set to change according to Snowy developer Andrew Chang, who announced a collaboration with Spotify make his watchOS app official.

Apple could have a variety of cloud-based services up its sleeve for iPhone owners. The company is expected to announce a complete revamp of its current MobileMe service, possibly at the 2011 WWDC in San Francisco this June. With the recent launches of Google's and Amazon's own streaming media services, the time is ripe for Apple to jump in the game.

Rumors have coalesced around the completion of a giant Apple data center in North Carolina as well as a purported email from Steve Jobs claiming that MobileMe is headed for changes. Not only this, but developers have discovered a cloud-based service (codenamed Castle) in the latest developer preview of Lion, Mac OS X 10.7. Apple reportedly even purchased the domain iCloud.com for $4.5 million from a company that has changed its name to CloudMe.

Would you buy a song if you could stream it an unlimited number of times from your iPhone or a web browser? Maybe not. What if the cost was only 10 cents? Not only does this free up your disk space, it's light on your wallet.

Lulu is counting on these two things to make them lots of money. They currently have 8.5 million songs in their library. Instead of having a music collection of files, everything you paid to play resides on remote servers until you demand a listen.

Subscribers to the Rhapsody music service will soon have their own iPhone app. That is, if Apple approves the software for distribution in the App Store.

Rhapsody is a service developed by RealNetworks, charging $14.99 monthly for streaming access to over eight million songs. The iPhone application would make it possible for Rhapsody To Go plan subscribers to listen via Wi-Fi, 3G or EDGE.