Apple has been widely rumored to be working on subscription based music streaming service for iOS devices. When Apple purchased LaLa, many believed that the company would introduce a streaming service. However, the purchase turned out to be to acquire talent to develop iTunes Match service.

Evad3rs released their ‘evasi0n’ unthethered jailbreak for iPhone5 on Tuesday and now 9to5Mac points us to hidden radio icons in iOS 6.1 release. Jailbreaking the iPad with evasi0n and then going through the files in Music.app revealed references to “radio button” with icons bearing resemblance to radio streaming icon in iTunes. Further, it was found that the button files are labeled with “buy” in the filename.

Many news publications like Bloomberg and WSJ previously reported on rumors about Apple working on Pandora competitor and cited music label licensing deals as being one of the hurdles being faced by the company. If those rumors are to be believed and with the hidden radio icons being revealed in iOS 6.1 is any indication then we could be seeing Apple announcing a new music subscription service soon.

Apple could be looking at allowing users to stream music tailored to their taste using the genius data and then integrating it with the iTunes store to allow purchase of favourite tracks. iTunes music store was recently made available in 56 new countries and the Cupertino, Calif. based company could now be looking at launching a music streaming service.

Apple acquired LaLa, a music streaming service, a little while back. One of our guesses for iPhone OS 4.0 was some kind of streaming service via iTunes, and perhaps also via iDevices, using the technology that Apple obtained when they bought LaLa.

Today if you visit LaLa’s website you can see that they have just announced that they are no longer accepting new users, and will be shutting their doors on May the 31st.

Lala is shutting down

The Lala service will be shut down on May 31st, 2010.
Unfortunately, we are no longer accepting new users.

This is very suspicious timing when you consider that the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) is just around the corner. Just 7 days after LaLa shutter themselves.

I would be very surprised if we do not see some kind of streaming service based on LaLa’s technology very soon from Apple.

Do you have a LaLa account? Can you log in and let us know if they have any details about “user transitioning” after May 31st? Do let us know in the comments if you do.

We doubt Apple would let anything slip. But you never know with their present form on keeping secrets!

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