Just prior the 2011 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 6, Apple just made several important announcements, one of which is the release of iCloud. This upcoming release encapsulates Apple’s own cloud service release as a competitive response to Amazon & Google, and comes after year-long talks about iCloud being in the making. 

It’s unclear if its cloud services will go beyond streaming music services to directly compete with Amazon and Google who recently  launched streaming music services, as well as with European player Spotify, who offers a well-established music service with over 10m members.

With iCloud, Apple can offer an easy way for consumers to create and listen online to their entire music collections, without the time-consuming work of manually transferring or uploading songs.

Apple appears to have secured deals with major record label companies to make such service possible.   Apple has been developing iCloud for more than a year and apparently did not want to release iCloud without such deals in place.

It’s conceivable that Apple’s iCloud service will completely replace its MobileMe service. That Web-based service lets users store data in a central location and synchronize calendars and contacts among computers and other devices.  More to learn at WWDC 2011.

Other highlights of the upcoming WWDC will the release of the next generation of Mac OSX, iOS 5, and Apple’s new iWork software suite for iPhone and Ipod Touch devices..