The latest piece of speculation courtesy of the current press-obsession with Apple is that the company could move elements of its iTunes service into the ever-nebulous “cloud.” Still, there’s more to this one than most.

It seems as though Apple is on a bit of a roll at the moment, with the world and its mother speculating on just what it is, could be or might one day build or offer through its existing services. While most of the buzz has been around the upcoming tablet offering, there’s also a lot around the iPhone’s rumoured new OS, the latest from the Wall Street Journal indicates something of a shift in the established iTunes model.

Indeed, it seems that, as part of its apparently all-but-confirmed tablet offering, Apple will be offering a cloud-based iTunes service. While there’s no indication for now of just what kind of an offering it might be, we’d suspect something that might allow users to access iTunes through a web-based interface. Indeed, the folks at TechCrunch seem entirely of the persuasion that what we’ll see is an introduction of some kind of open iTunes API, which could introduce buying music directly through other services, which is interesting.

We’ll be curious to see just where Apple’s recently snagged Lala.com fits into all this, but it’d be interesting to see Apple introduce a subscription-based service, which could run on a similar model to Spotify and Rhapsody, offering users unlimited streaming music for a monthly fee.

Of course, all of this is just rumour and hearsay for now, but we’d expect Apple to unveil a bundle of bits and pieces if and when it shows off its not-quite-confirmed tablet offering.