Apple launched iTunes Radio, a streaming service integrated into iOS 7 and the latest versions of iTunes, last year. Now, according to a report by Billboard, which previously broke a lot of correct details about iTunes Radio before its release, Apple is taking the next step towards a Spotify-type version of iTunes Radio.

Apple's iTunes Radio is a lot like Pandora in its current form. You can build stations off of a track, artist, or genre selection, tell iTunes Radio to "play more like this" or "never play this song" and customize how strict or loose your stations are in exploring music styles beyond your selection.

But you can't play specific tracks on demand, as you can with Spotify.

But that may eventually change, if Billboard's report on Apple's moves within the music industry is correct (again). Billboard says Apple is pondering an on-demand streaming option that would let people listen to entire tracks without buying them.

The report describes talks going on between Apple and record labels on the prospects of allowing a paid on demand streaming service. And while Apple founder Steve Jobs always thought fans would never subscribe for a music service, preferring to keep the iTunes purchasing system instead, iTunes Radio already has an indirect form of a subscription service in iTunes Match, which for about $25 per year, people can remove the ads that intermittently play on iTunes Radio along with the service's main feature, cloud-based music.

But even with iTunes Match, you have to buy tracks at full price in the iTunes Store if you want access to them at any time. This, once a strength of Apple's music service, is increasingly becoming a liability. Digital album sales in the U.S., according to Nielsen, were recently down 13 percent and individual digital track sales are down 11 percent from last year. Meanwhile, streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube have grown by almost 40 percent in the last two years, according to Billboard, and as much as 51 percent worldwide.

Those are compelling reasons for Apple to look into an on demand streaming service, along with a big competitor in Amazon rumored to introduce a Spotify-like music service of its own this year -- but don't get your hopes up too high. Negotiations for various digital music distribution rights packages with different labels, and for different countries, can be daunting and slow.

"This is an incredibly complex task, just to figure out what we needed to do," said one executive involved in the process to Billboard. "When you start going into smaller countries and trying to get it fixed, you can find 14 versions of a single in, say, Belgium, and many of the versions might be the wrong one for that market." The fact that Apple is such a huge and influential player in the digital music market, making up more than 40 percent of music industry profits on records in the U.S., will make negotiations even more painstaking, because any changes Apple makes will have a significant impact on all of the record labels.

Perhaps even more exciting (for the segment of iTunes fans who happen to own an Android smartphone, at least), Billboard also says that Apple is considering making an iTunes app for Android phones. Again, this was something that was never considered as an option by former Apple leader Steve Jobs.

According to the Verge, Jobs was quoted in Walter Isaacson's official biography saying that he didn't "see an advantage of putting [Apple's] own music app on Android, except to make users happy," adding that "I don't want to make Android users happy." But CEO Tim Cook has spoken on record about the possibility of porting Apple software to Android with a much more forgiving tone, saying in 2013 that Apple would "have no religious issue with doing that. If we thought it made sense for us to do that, we would do that."