Is Apple Getting Ready to Bring iTunes to the Web?

When Apple bought streaming music service Lala, speculation was that the company intended to work on a Web interface for iTunes. Lala’s engineers would certainly have had the expertise, and the company had an interesting approach to the concept of owning songs–users could buy “web albums” which gave them unlimited streaming rights but no downloads or physical copies.

Now there’s more reason to suspect that the company intends to make a Web interface for iTunes. Cupertino is hiring a user interface engineer for a position that could be tailored to the project. The job description says the engineer will be “responsible for implementing interactive, rich media projects within the iTunes group” and proceeds to list familiarity with a number of Web technologies as qualifications.

I hope we will see a Web interface for iTunes. I loved Lala’s vision of how users would want to consume music, and it’s time for Apple to move forward from the mp3 player model. Users today are connected to the Internet more than ever, and we need music services that take full advantage of this.