million computers worldwide and used for about 70% of all digital music purchases. (Exact numbers are hard to find, but it’s huge.) Its reach would seem to make iTunes a terrific platform for transforming the media landscape — if it weren’t such a bloated, hard-to-use, overloaded mess.

We don’t know what Apple will be announcing tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the situation,” says it will include the long-awaited coming of the Beatles catalog to the iTunes Music Store. It could be the addition of a streaming-media subscription service to iTunes. It might be an overhaul of Apple’s abortive attempt at a social network, Ping. Or it could be something completely different.

Regardless of what Apple does announce, here’s what we’re hoping for.

Subscription Music

Already iTunes lets you rent TV shows. The company is building a billion-dollar, 500,000-square-foot data center, and has yet to do anything really interesting with LaLa, the streaming-music startup it acquired in late 2009 and shut down earlier this year. Isn’t it about time that Apple offered an all-you-can-eat subscription music service, similar to Rdio or Spotify or Rhapsody, that lets you listen to whatever you want?

It’s surprising the company hasn’t already done this (and a little bit embarrassing to us, given the number of times we’ve called for this). Still, if we were going to put our money on a bet about tomorrow’s announcement, it’d be this: The signs all point toward an imminent subscription streaming-music service. If it doesn’t happen this week, it’ll happen soon. We hope.

Make it a Cloud-Based Service

“Cloud” services are this year’s hot marketing trend, but for a good reason. Saying that a service lives “in the cloud” is shorthand for saying that it’s stored on a server somewhere out there in the internet, and don’t you trouble your pretty little head about where or how. It’s the internet equivalent of “and then a miracle occurs.”

But with an increasing amount of our lives lived through portable gadgets, cloud services meet a need: Letting us get to our stuff from wherever we are, no matter what device we’re using.

And that billion-dollar data center? Once you’re using it to deliver subscription music, why not let it deliver all of a customer’s music library?

In other words, to hell with syncing. We want our iTunes music streamed to us in real time, on our phones, tablets, notebooks, netbooks and work computers.

And there are millions of us who would pay for a service like that.

Photo: Jonathan Snyder / Wired.com

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Authors: Dylan F. Tweney

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