CNET has an unsourced story that a new music service from Apple will be really neat, and the major record labels are excited. Yeah, sure. The labels hate how much influence Apple has on music. Google showed its locker service yesterday, and the early reviews ran from “awesome” to “miserable.” Neither Google nor Amazon got new licenses from the labels, so they’re hoping that a user uploading his own collection will cover them, though current court cases haven’t really proven that. Frankly, streaming access to your own collection – even if you don’t have to upload it, presumably what Apple may offer – isn’t very exciting. It’s a reasonable feature to include with a richer service. But $10 a month streaming access to massive libraries didn’t make Rhapsody or Napster huge hits. Everybody loves Spotify, but that’s because it has an ad-supported free service that it can’t duplicate in the US because of licensing rates. There will be no “salvation of the music industry” without more flexibility and experimentation from the rights holders. And even then, it’ll never be 1999 again.