While I would love to see this happen, I think that people will be clinging too tightly to their shrinking piece of the pie to make it happen. I wouldn't trust anyone besides Apple to build a consumer-acceptable client for this, and it goes against everything they hold dear. MSFT (you name it) and Yahoo (recently discontinued music service) have let consumers down and won't be trusted. Amazon still isn't thought of as a tech company by most people, plus their focus on sales would appear too much of a conflict of interest. Google's products are too unfocused outside of their search core, plus I think they're too big, powerful, and rich for the music companies to trust them. So I think the big tech companies are all out.

Could the music companies come together and make something easy but powerful enough to use, a la Hulu? Based on their history, probably not, but desperation (and a decent model to follow) might convince them to cooperate.

Good luck to Hank on getting this idea going!