After signing contracts with three of the four major music labels (Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and the Warner Music Group) to license their recordings, Apple has just entered the final stages of preparation for its cloud-based music service to be launched. Apple is still in negotiations with the largest of the four labels, Universal Music Group, but that deal is expected to be completed by sometime next week.

Like Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Google’s Music Beta, Apple’s cloud-based music service would allow users to store their digital music library on the Web and stream it directly to their smartphones, computers, tablets, and other electronic devices. However, unlike Amazon and Google’s cloud-based music services, which were introduced within the past two months, Apple has taken the added precaution of obtaining licenses from the major music labels as well as beginning to obtain licenses from music publishers, who ultimately control the copyrights for the composition of songs. While Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Google’s Music Beta services are free, Apple will likely charge a small fee to be able to use their streaming music service to offset the cost of the contracts with music labels and publishers. The permission to use copyrighted material will allow Apple’s cloud music service to have more advanced features than either Amazon or Google’s services though, which are essentially Web-based hard drives that users would have to directly upload music to. The label licenses would also allow Apple to design a more efficient system in which it is predicted that the service would be able to scan a user’s iTunes library and sync these songs to the company’s master collection located on Apple’s servers, without the hassle of having to upload each song to the cloud – which could take days.

With a ready market of over 200 million iTunes users, analysts say that Apple might announce the new music service as early as next month, when the company holds its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. “The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) showcases the latest innovations and the newest technologies in iOS and Mac OS X. Over 1,000 Apple engineers guide you through five exciting days of in-depth technical sessions and hands-on labs that demonstrate how to harness the incredible power of the world’s most advanced operating systems into your apps.”

Apple fanboys may have to wait a while until the service is ready for a release date though, as the company always makes sure to work out all the kinks and to release a product only when it has been thoroughly tested… but you should already know that by now, since Apple has seemingly become its own religion.

Photo by Mark Milian via CNN