I just got an invitation to an Apple press event in San Francisco on September 1st. Here’s the art–either the company is finally making its long-awaited move into the guitar business, or it’s scheduled its traditional September iPod launch.

Sadly, I won’t be covering this particular Apple event in person. (I have a good excuse: I’m going to be in Berlin at the IFA tech show.) But I’m curious about just how significant the news will be. New iPods are a given, and there are rumors of an Apple TV replacement and a seven-inch iPad. As is my wont, I’ll ask you for formal predictions shortly before the event, but any initial guesses and/or hopes?

Volkswagen never wants you to forget that its cars are engineered in Germany–hey, its current slogan is “Das Auto.” But cool Web tools,  innovative gizmos, and digital entertainment aren’t exactly synonymous with German engineering. It’s Silicon Valley that’s the world’s headquarters for that stuff. And so it’s not that startling that much of VW’s work on new and future electronics, gadgetry, and interfaces happens at its Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, in close proximity to electronics engineering talent the company might want to hire and tech companies it might want to work with. The ERL is also a quick drive away from Stanford University’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab, where VW collaborates with university students and researchers on new technologies. (I wrote about VAIL’s self-driving Passat a few months ago.)

As part of VW’s press event for the 2011 Jetta, I took a tour of the ERL last week. Herewith, some photographic highlights.

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Reuters’ Dean Goodman snagged an interview with Yoko Ono in which she says that the Beatles aren’t likely to show up on iTunes any time soon:

“(Apple CEO) Steve Jobs has his own idea and he’s a brilliant guy,” Ono, the 77-year-old widow of John Lennon, told Reuters. “There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out.

“Don’t hold your breath … for anything,” she said with a laugh.

If the main issue is Steve Jobs being stubborn about some unspecified negotiating points, shouldn’t Jeff Bezos rush in, buckle under, and give Paul, Ringo, Yoko, and George Harrison’s widow Olivia basically anything they want to get the Beatles catalog on Amazon MP3? Wouldn’t that be the best publicity Amazon ever got? Wouldn’t it sidestep having to do things Steve Jobs’ way? Wouldn’t there be a chance that Apple would respond by figuring out a way to make the Beatles folks happy?

And isn’t it increasingly bizarre that we’re this far into the digital music revolution and there’s no way to legally acquire the music of the greatest rock group of them all?

Back in November, I predicted that the Beatles would be available for download within 18 months. I thought that Sir Paul’s declaration at the time that it might not happen was canny hype for a release that was already in the works. Now I’m not so sure. The big question now: Will the Beatles be downloadable before the last CD store in the world closes, or after?

Over at CNet, Greg Sandoval’s inside sources say Apple’s setting low expectations for cloud music, and hasn’t yet acquired licenses to stream songs from its own servers.

In other words, the assumption that Apple acquired Lala to build its own streaming music service won’t pan out anytime soon. The Lala crew may actually be working on some sort of streaming video service instead, Sandoval’s sources say. Apple acquired Lala in December 2009, and shut it down in late May.

We’ve written about Lala quite a few times, because it took such a unique approach to digital music. In addition to selling MP3s, Lala sold streaming tracks for 10 cents each, and let you listen to any song once for free. It could also scan your entire downloaded music library and store a cloud version to be accessed anywhere. For Apple to offer any of those services, it needs more licensing from the music industry, and Apple reportedly hasn’t negotiated for that yet.

But as I look at the digital music landscape now, I don’t think Lala is really necessary. All-you-can-eat music services have emerged from Rhapsody, MOG and now Rdio, all of them offering mobile and desktop access for $10 per month, with the ability to download songs locally. That’s a lot more convenient than building a streaming library of individual tracks, and could be more economical for music junkies. If you just want to hear a song once for free, you can accomplish that with music search tools from Google and Bing.

As for the digital locker concept, how essential is it? Music doesn’t take up a lot of room, and storage capacity on mobile devices is only increasing. I’d rather see Apple focus on streaming video, because movies and TV shows are much more unwieldy to store and transfer. Although I was sad to see Lala go, I’m not desperate for it to come back.

And the subscription music services just keep coming: Rdio, from Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, is leaving private beta today. That means that anyone can sign up for this ambitious new offering, which includes a Web-based service plus mobile apps for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. It competes against such services as Rhapsody and MOG, and from my time with it so far, it seems to do so formidably.

In terms of features, Rdio may be the most comprehensive iTunes substitute so far. (For the moment, at least–the competition is pretty intense in this category.) Like the late, lamented Lala, it can scan your music collection and add albums you already have to your online collection. (It doesn’t match Lala’s ability to give you online access even for stuff that’s not in its own collection, though, and it’s not finding every track in my library.) Its iPhone app supports iOS4 multitasking, so you can listen in the background while using another app. It has a neat syncing feature that lets you find music in your desktop browser, then auto-download it to your phone for listening whether or not you have Internet access.

Like Lala, Rdio also emphasizes the social aspect of music: Its Web-based version lets you find and follow friends and peek at the music they’ve been listening to. Every time I try a feature like this, I’m struck by the fact that my friendships almost never seem to have anything to do with shared tastes in music. But maybe you’ll find it a useful way to discover songs you’ll like.

The service says it currently offers seven million songs–fewer than Rhapsody’s ten million plus or the 13 million in Apple’s iTunes Store, but still impressive.

Rdio is a paid service, and follows the standard pricing for subscription music: The Web-based version is $4.99 a month, and Web-plus-mobile is $9.99 a month. In both cases, you can listen to all the music you like as long as you keep paying. The $9.99 fee seems to cover multiple devices (Rhapsody charges $14.99 a month if you want to listen on more than one mobile gadget).

Subscription music remains a theoretically appealing idea that surprisingly few folks choose to pay for. (People who are willing to plunk down money for songs, it seems, prefer to buy them outright rather than rent them.) But Rdio comes close to erasing all the downsides of subscriptions except for the need to keep paying, and I’ll bet its major competitors will match most of its features soon. If you’d like to feast on music for $10 a month, give it a listen.

Music service MOG has launched the iPhone and Android apps I wrote about last month. For $9.99 a month, you get unlimited streaming and album downloads in your browser and on your device. And MOG has a unique “artist radio” feature that can play only songs by that artist, rather than the more typical combination of songs by the artist, related artists, vaguely-similar artists, and not-similar-at-all artists.

MOG offers a three-day trial that’s worth checking out. Nitpick on the iPhone edition: It’s been waiting for Apple approval for so long that it’s not an iOS 4 app. That means that it can’t play in the background while you use other programs. Once it has that feature, it should be a killer alternative to iTunes. (As should Rhapsody, which says it’s working on a multitasking version.)

Wait, Badfinger has opted out of digital delivery until now, too?

Music service MOG has a number of attractive features, including Rhapsody-like on-demand access to albums and tracks, “artist stations” that only play songs by the artist in question, and a low price ($4.99 a month for unlimited streaming). It’s also had one major limitation: It’s only been available in your browser. But MOG has plans to change that, starting next month.

As TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid is reporting, MOG says that Apple has approved a MOG app for the iPhone–one that lets you stream or download any song from its catalog. It intends to release the iPhone app and a similar Android one in July, and to charge $9.99 for all-you-can-listen access in the browser and on a phone. (That’s low by historic standards, but the same price that Rhapsody charges for a plan that lets you listen online and on one mobile device.)

July should also see the debut of a version of MOG for Roku’s cool, inexpensive TV set-top box. Unlimited on-demand Roku listening will be included in the basic $4.99 plan; for music fans who want to listen a lot without spending a lot, it sounds like a deal.

Pandora may be the Web’s best-known personalized radio service, but it’s not the best one. That honor belongs to Slacker, which just upped its game by adding caching to its iPhone app. The new feature lets you download thousands of songs to your iPhone, listen to Slacker’s customized stations when you don’t have an Internet connection, or a reliable one, or you just want to conserve battery life. And as the Slacker folks are pointing out, it may prove especially appealing for folks who sign up for AT&T’s new, not-unlimited-anymore data plans–they can cache music over Wi-Fi, then listen without eating up any wireless data.

(When you tell Slacker to cache, it advises you to do so over 3G only if you’ve got an unlimited data plan–that alert will take on new meaning once there are iPhone users who don’t have unlimited data.)

Missing, at least for now, is the automated night-time caching feature that’s available on Slacker’s Android and BlackBerry versions. Maybe Slacker will add it once iPhone OS 4 is out and it can make the downloading happen in the background.

Dave Zatz liked this feature when he tried it a couple of weeks ago, and I do, too. It’s a point in favor of Slacker’s $4.99 a month Plus service; you can try it out for two weeks for free. After the jump, some screenshots.

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When it comes to the closure of the spectacular Lala music service, I’m still working my way through the five stages of grief. For the first time since Lala went bye-bye at the end of last month, I idly launched its iPhone application. (The company never released it, but it gave me a prerelease version in November, less than a month before Apple snapped up Lala and chose not to release the iPhone app it had just acquired.)

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It’s June 1st, and it’s official: Apple has shuttered Lala, the wonderful music service which it bought back in December. Analyzing Apple’s motivations and predicting its actions is usually a horrible mistake, but I would think that the fact Lala went away a week before a Steve Jobs WWDC keynote is not a promising sign–if Apple was prepping to turn Lala into iTunes.com, wouldn’t it want to turn all those Lala subscribers into charter members of the new service rather than telling them their accounts are no more? I could, of course, be wrong–and I hope I am.

The New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating Apple’s tactics in the digital music market on antitrust grounds–a business in which Apple’s iTunes has 69 percent of the market and second-place Amazon.com has only eight percent.

The article doesn’t specify much in the way of alleged Apple misdeeds except for threatening to withdraw marketing support for songs if their publishers signed temporary exclusive deals with Amazon. Last time I checked, I wasn’t an antitrust lawyer–is that illegal?

When will the Beatles finally be available on iTunes, or anywhere else you can legally download music or stream it on demand? I’m beginning to think it’ll be when I’m 64–which gives the multiple parties involved in this saga until 2028 to get their respective acts together. Or at least this MG Siegler story at TechCrunch, covering recent comments by Sir Paul and EMI, provides no particular reason to expect any good news any time soon.

Sad but in no way surprising: Apple is shutting down Lala, the excellent music service it bought last December. Lala has already stopped accepting new members; existing customers have access until the end of next month.

Unfortunately, Apple is continuing a long tradition of shuttered online services leaving customers who “bought” stuff at least partially in the lurch. It’s telling people who bought streaming Web songs that they’ll get an iTunes Store credit for the amount they spent “in appreciation of [their] support.”  But there’s no equivalent at the iTunes Store for Web songs, which played only online but only cost a dime apiece, so the credit is more akin to a discount. I hope nobody blew too much money on Web songs thinking that he or she was assembling a music collection of any permanence.

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Rhapsody’s new iPhone/iPod Touch version with offline listening is live in Apple’s App Store. I’ve been giving it a whirl, and the new features are pretty darn straightforward–and overall, they do a good job of filling in a major hole in the original iPhone edition of the music service. It’s the first music service for the iPhone that offers both streaming and downloading. (For U.S. users, at least–in Europe, Spotify has has both. And maybe Apple will see fit to unleash the wonderful unreleased LaLa app it now owns in some form someday.)

As before, whenever you’ve got a 3G or Wi-Fi connection you can search for albums and artists, pull up playlists (including ones you created on a PC or Mac), and stream an unlimited quantity of music from Rhapsody’s millions of tracks. But now your playlists have a Download button–tap it, and all the songs in that list get downloaded so you can listen to them when you don’t have an Internet connection (or have one that can be spotty, which is often the case when you’re driving).

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Rhapsody says its iPhone app with offline playlists goes live Monday morning. It may be the most compelling form of the music service to date, although it won’t really achieve something close to an equal footing with iTunes until iPhone OS 4 ships, enabling Rhapsody to play in the background while you use other apps…