Extended iTunes song previews delayed, licensing may be to blame

100% agree. I thought the "extended preview" everyone was talking about was referring to the lala experience of being able to listen to a full song before purchasing, and maybe even having web listens for less, I believe lala charged .10

Instead try only copied parts of the social networking aspects. Boo.

As I understand it, there's two alternate ideas behind the music streaming movement. Both of them involve remotely storing media rather than carrying it around on a device's internal drive, which can be limiting for people with large media libraries. In my case, I've got almost 100 GB of files in my iTunes library alone, and almost 750 GB of non-iTunes media files -- way too much to fit on my 32 GB iPhone 4.

The first music streaming idea: media files live on your computer, and you stream remotely from your computer to your iOS device. This partially solves the problem of limited-capacity portable devices, but you're still limited by your computer's hard drive size.

The second idea only really started getting traction when we saw how big Apple's new data centre in North Carolina is. This idea has everybody storing their media files in "the cloud" (i.e., on these servers) and streaming them to ALL of their devices, both Mac/PC and iOS. In other words, rather than storing 100 GB of music in an iTunes folder on your Mac, that data would be stored on Apple's servers and streamed to you on-demand.

The first idea is something that could probably happen *today* as long as it was restricted to WiFi only--I seriously doubt AT&T is even remotely close to being able to handle the strain of streaming tens of millions of songs per day over 3G to iPhones and iPads. The second idea sounds neat on paper, but both wireless and fixed-line broadband infrastructure are probably years away from being able to support something like that on such a grand scale.

Oh okay, thanks :D, but isn't the second idea also limited by size? Since im sure Apple would put a cap on how much you could store on their servers. But im one of the lucky few who has yet to exceed 5 GB of music XD, so i might not need this streaming service, though itd be nice to have.