iTunes May Be Heading Online

iTunes may soon be coming to the web.  At least, that's the latest word from the Wall Street Journal.

Apple recently bought Lala — a web-based music store/player — with an eye towards taking that company's model of having users stream music online instead of having it stored locally on their computer and apply it to an online version of iTunes.

What does that mean exactly?

Well, right now, you buy a song on iTunes, it downloads to your computer and you can do whatever you want with it.  With a browser-based model, you buy a song on iTunes, and iTunes provides you with access to listen to that song, but you never have to deal with the actual file.

It's like if you go into a restaurant, you buy a hamburger, and the restaurant allows you to put that hamburger on your plate, but you can't actually eat it.

Well, you can eat it — you can actually eat it as many times as you want — but you can't take it home in a doggie bag, and you certainly can't share the hamburger with your friends.

Unless you give your friends the password to get to your seat in the restaurant, then they could eat the hamburger, but they'd have to wear a disguise pretending to be you.

Oh, and you probably have to sign an agreement at the restaurant saying that at any time the restaurant can take the hamburger back and never serve it to you again, because, technically, they are the ones that own the hamburger.

Well, them and their cooks, but the cooks have been getting screwed over for years, so no one really cares about the cooks.

If that doesn't make any sense, now you know how everyone in the music industry feels.

[via Mashable]