Next year's iPhones will have Beats Music baked in: report

The Financial Times claims that plans are afoot to make Beats Music -- the music streaming service Apple bought as part of a $3 billion acquisition earlier this year -- into a native iPhone and iPad app.

By building music streaming directly into a smartphone's operating system, it will be easier for Apple to challenge a growing number of competitors -- from Spotify and Deezer to Google Play Music and You Tube Music Key.

According to the Financial Times' sources, the repackaged launch of Beats Music will be timed to coincide with the launch of the Apple Watch which is expected to officially go on sale in March.

With the launch will come an update to Apple's iOS 8 operating system and it is believed that Beats Music will be part of that update.

If the report is accurate, it means that unless Beats Music is also kept as a standalone app, the new service will only be available on newer iPhones and iPads.

As well as addressing the competitive threat of other streaming apps, integrating Beats into iOS could also make the app more responsive, easier to tailor and more understanding of users' needs.

In just two years, music streaming has gone from obscurity to the consumer mainstream as a means of discovering and accessing songs. Indeed, according to the latest data, royalties generated by Spotify in Europe now outstrip those earned from digital track downloads from iTunes.

Apple has resisted moving into streaming for as long as it possibly can, but the acquisition of Beats this summer signaled that the company had accepted downloading music is about to go out of fashion.