May 19, 2011 10:31 GMT  ·  By

The online music space is heating up. Of course, that's what we've been hearing for over a year now as major players such as Google, Apple or Amazon were rumored to be working on powerful cloud music products.

Things lingered though and by the time Amazon and Google launched their cloud locker services, the hype had died down and so did the ambitions of the companies involved.

Both Amazon and Google decided to go ahead and launch products with no label licensing. This means that they got to do whatever they liked, but also means some severe limitations that hinder user experience.

The last holdout was Apple which, like Google and Amazon, has been negotiating with the music labels for a deal for the past year or so. Unlike Google and Amazon, Apple stuck it out, it continued negotiations even with the notoriously huge demands music labels have.

In fact, Apple may have had it worst of all since the labels got burned once and enabled the company to dominate digital music sales in the US. And with the pseudo-monopoly also came leverage that Apple used to get the labels to fall in line and agree to the pricing and terms the Cupertino-based company wanted.

Hungry for a new player to challenge Apple, the labels should have been eager to work with Google or Amazon. Even so, it seems that their demands were still enough to drive both companies away, leaving Apple to reap the rewards.

The latest rumors say that Apple has signed EMI. It had already reached a deal with Warner Music Group and both Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are said to be close to signing a deal with Apple.

Whatever Apple has cooking, things are now pretty much in the bag. The rumor also is that, technologically, Apple's cloud music product has been completed and the engineers have been waiting on the layers to do their part.

With deals with all four major labels, Apple could move to launch something within weeks. And when it does, it's probably going to be something that's clearly superior to what both Google and Amazon are currently offering.

Even a simple cloud locker service, like Music by Google Beta and Amazon Cloud Player/Drive, would be significantly better with licensing, if only because users won't have to upload gigabytes of music to the cloud, something that can take hours or even days.