Along with today’s Wall Street Journal article, several outlets are reporting the integration of Lala and its technologies into Apple’s iTunes ecosystem as some revolutionary thing, even going so far as to say this will be the complete rethinking of iTunes.

Not necessarily likely.  As early as two years ago rumors swirled that iTunes – or at least the music component – would be integrated into the MobileMe technology base, which to most of us means one word: sync.  Not the sync you think of when your files are being backed up, byte by byte, to the great cloud in the sky.  We’re talking the kind of sync that you used to find in the early days of MP3.com: look at my hard drive, find my songs, and use an algorithm to decide if I ‘own’ the songs I want be able to stream from a master of each located on the provider’s servers in the sky.  In and of itself, not much different from Lala’s current streaming technology but perhaps a little less of a headache.

Certainly Apple considered this model because it meant locking newly acquired music subscriptions into existing MobileMe features (and pricing) while making even more attractive the MM’s core services for existing users.  But for one reason or another (one might guess a lack of developed backend infrastructure or perhaps an indication that they needed to wrench a few more dollars out of the purchase model), Apple opted to wait.

What most of us already knew was MobileMe sync was still rather broken, and iPhone initial release or two confirmed this.  Eddy Cue managed the clean up this mess and now we have a very tight, quick sync service.  What we also new was the iPhone and iPod touch craze hadn’t transformed a large base of consumers into a group of MobileMe prospects.

But now?  Sounds like a great time to extend the any device sync strategy to music.  Think ‘iTunes Home Directory’ when you consider where this is headed – at least for now.

So we’ll almost certainly see something that looks like Lala’s web accessible personal music collection but with a twist: Apple doesn’t enjoy losing money and Lala was hemorrhaging with its cheap web streaming option despite selling downloadable music as well.  With Apple music downloads will continue, the web service will be integrated, but the same engine driving iTunes’ Pandora-like Genius system will be extended to accommodate song fingerprinting to enable iTunes web to authorize playback of everything you bought through iTS, Amazon, or acquired anywhere else and threw into your collection.

The cloud’s cool, there’s no doubt we’re eventually sending just about everything up there in some form, but no reason for all this talk about the music industry changing again overnight.  As the leader of the pack, Apple has no need to spin the model on its head.  But they do have the drive and the DNA to make enjoying your music even easier than before.