Everybody’s talking about the Cloud, wishing they could be in the Cloud, but scared to venture to the Cloud. Except Apple, which appears to have moved to the computing stratosphere in a big way. 

The company recently purchased LaLa, a four-year-old Web service that lets users play the music they own from the Web — or more precisely, from the Cloud — which is the Web.

Users of Lala store their music in the Cloud and then they can access it from anywhere they roam, so long as they have an Internet connection and some kind of software that plays an MP3.

The big question since word made the rounds that Apple had bought Lala is this: What will they do with it? Start their own music streaming service?

As it is, Apple dominates the music download business. Hands down. But with the popularity of music streaming, they could corner the market on all sorts of consumers — the folks who want to download music and own it on their own computers and the folks who just want access to a wide variety of music at any time or in any place.

Streaming music means you don’t have to worry about downloads or syncing. You just have access to a huge amount of music at any time.

Apple could sell subscriptions to the Lala service and allow customers to stream any music they like in any amount they want for a set fee. Or they could charge by the song. There are any number of business models that might work.

In one way, Apple’s already offering music lovers the ability to store their music in the Cloud with the company’s “Mobile Me” service that’s a flat-fee service that syncs you computer and smartphone contents to their Cloud.

But so far, the company’s not talking about their plans for this most recent acquisition. The New York Times is reporting that the licensing agreements Lala has with the big four music labels aren’t transferable and that what Apple’s bought is the engineering know-how to stream music to a wide variety of technologies.

Still, if anything’s going to make Apple the music industry power to be reckoned with, this Lala purchase seems to be positioning the company to be the 800-pound gorilla in the marketplace.

Tags: acuqisition, Apple, cloud computing, Lala, music, streaming