• by John Capone , November 15, 2010

Apple, on its homepage this morning, promises that tomorrow's announcement concerning iTunes will be one "you'll never forget." Most music fans haven't forgotten the way Apple last year bought and then promptly shuttered cloud-based music service Lala. The smart money says that tomorrow Apple will be adding some sort of cloud functionality to iTunes. Such speculation had been brewing since Apple acquired Lala in December 2009.

Since then, there's little doubt that Lala users moved onto other cloud-based music services such as MOG, Grooveshark, Rdio, and Spotify. And, of course, they've been joined by countless new users.

Shortly before Apple acquired Lala, Lala had introduced a function where members could upload their entire music libraries to their cloud-based accounts, thereby obviating the need for an iTunes music library. That must have gotten tongues in Cupertino wagging. After introducing this function Lala announced it would soon roll out a mobile app. The app never materialized, but Apple came calling with bags full of money, and swallowed Lala whole.

We'll see Tuesday how Apple will price access to cloud-based libraries. In Lala's pricing model, buying web songs cost pennies, albums just a couple of dollars (this gave one unlimited access to the particular song or album as long as they had a wifi or 3G connection), while downloads were fairly consistent with the iTunes model.

Newer services such as MOG offer unlimited access to millions of albums for a monthly fee of $9.99.

And, of course, on the movie and television front, Apple's iTunes faces cloud competition from the likes of Netflix and Hulu, services that offer users instant access to movies and TV shows for flat-monthly fees.