A cloud is on the horizon for online music listeners

In the 2000s, the ability to download individual songs and shuffle them in iPod remade listening habits and musical tastes.

This decade, all signs are that the music industry will try to move away from selling music that consumers own and store on their own devices, including iPods, iPads, and other MP3 players.

Instead, this may be the decade of the cloud.

Music files would be stored on remote servers that listeners could access whenever they wished, either by paying a fee or by listening to periodic commercials.

"Cloud"-based subscription services - such as Rhapsody, MOG (which threw a party at the South by Southwest festival featuring Free Energy), and Napster, which was relaunched as a pay site in 2003 - maintain libraries of millions of songs that users can play as long as they have an Internet connection.

None of those services have caught fire yet with the public, and Spotify, the Swedish service popular in Europe, is not available in the United States. The popularity of the Internet radio service Pandora, however, suggests the cloud will keep rolling in.

Since launching an iPhone app in 2008, Pandora has grown rapidly. It now claims more than 50 million listeners worldwide.

Don't think Apple founder Steve Jobs hasn't noticed: The next supersecret announcement hoped for by music-tech geeks is that the California company will launch a streaming service through iTunes.

Apple bought the popular site Lala.com in December, then shut it down in the spring, fueling speculation that an Apple cloud service is on the way.

The prospect of storing your music collection on servers owned by Apple - or Google, which is also rumored to be getting into the cloud-music biz - would mean not having to deal with running out of storage space on your 80-gigabyte hard drive when you've got 30,000 songs on it. But it also might mean that you'll wind up paying, in some way, every time you listen to one of those songs.