Why Apple doesn't do streaming: Apple hates committing to something unless it's absolutely perfect. There are numerous examples, but NFC technology is a good one that comes to mind. Granted, they've made mistakes, like Mobile Me, but that was due to poor implementation, rather than immature technology and infrastructure. A similar problem has been in their way as far music streaming goes. The obstacle in their path to connecting consumers to content are labels (the same applies to cable companies and iTV, but that's a different story). Labels are greedy, difficult to deal with, and a general nuisance who provide little or no value. Meanwhile, the actual content providers, i.e. songwriters and performers, view labels as a necessary evil, but no one believes for a second that needing them is ideal.
The vision: The idea is that Apple is looking to buy Beats to start their own label so they can cut out the label, who is an unnecessary middleman. My reasoning behind this is that Beats is a very strong brand, mainly because it's been run by two very savvy music industry veterans who know how to "produce", in every sense of the word. They're more of a household name than any other headphone maker can claim. If any company had the power, skill, and recognition to pull off disrupting the record industry, it would be beats. The only problem is they don't have enough money, do you know who does? Boom. It's as simple as that. Just take a look at this http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2014/05/beats-royalty-s.... and tell me, from Apple's perspective, what the problem is with a music streaming service? The labels get all the money and the artists get none. All Beats has to do is say, "Boom, we're starting a label and we own the streaming service, so you can have a 30% cut per play and we'll keep 70%". If you were an artist and you could literally improve your earnings by 10x wouldn't you? $248K vs $22K is criminal.
Just imagine, from Apple's perspective, what this would open up? Essentially, it's total vertical integration, a pipe from artist to audience, unadulterated by stupid bullshit. For example they could have complete coordination of everything from the original recording quality of an album to specialized super high end digital to analog converters in the hardware - from lossless media formats that were recorded especially for that format to headphones that are tuned to provide optimal performance. This is a complete bargain and no ones talking about it. It will serve as a prototype for what Apple would love to do to the television industry (think Apple acquires HBO, a win win for both), and they're doing right under everyone's noses because no one can think big enough. Apple would never, in a million years, purchase a company like that for so much money if they didn't have a very good idea of how it would pay off 10x.
And remember, this is the same company that seriously considered becoming a carrier, in order to launch the iPhone.