There will no doubt be a few groans of disappointment in Spotify’s various European offices after the announcement that Apple is to launch its first online music service that allows customers to listen to tracks streamed over the internet.

The service is expected to be built around a website called iTunes.com.

As The Times quite rightly points out, the move could pose a significant threat to existing music operations such as Spotify and We7. The paper quotes “music industry insiders” as saying that iTunes customers will be given access to a “digital locker” that will automatically store songs bought through Apple’s music store.

At present, songs downloaded from iTunes can be stored only on a computer or iPod. Under the digital locker system, customers will also be able to access the tracks they have purchased by logging on to a website — expected to be called iTunes.com — where the songs could be streamed over the internet to any computer.

This move has been expected of Apple for some time and indeed it prepared the way last month by announcing the closure of Lala.com, a music site that it bought for about $80 million (€63.7 million) in December last year.

Lala’s software allows people to store personal music libraries online and play them through a web browser, alongside any tracks they subsequently purchase. This technology and Lala’s engineering team are thought to underpin Apple’s new service.

A chief executive at one online music company told the Times that he believes that the digital locker was a “stepping stone” toward Apple’s creation of a fully fledged online music service. “He said that if song-streaming sites such as Spotify could prove their business models were profitable, Apple would have the infrastructure to launch a similar system quickly and squash such upstart businesses,” added the article.