Friday, April 30, 2010

What Does Apple's Shutdown of Lala Mean for Streaming Music?

It was announced today that Apple will be shutting down Lala.com by the end of May. When they purchased the music streaming service a few months ago, many speculated that they would use it to jump-start their own cloud-based music service. However, no such announcement has been made as of yet. This leaves us with even fewer streaming options here in the US. We still have Mog.com, Napster and Rhapsody, and Spotify has yet to grace our shores.

If this development means that Apple will soon be rolling the Lala technology into iTunes, this is great news! However, there is also a chance that the opposite is true, and we have just lost another option for free streaming of music. What do you think?

Related articles:
Wired - Apple Kills Lala Music Service
PC World - Apple's Shutdown of Lala Fuel Rumors of Web-based iTunes
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i hate to say it, but i would bet they bought lala just to remove them from the face of the earth.... should be interesting to see what happens.

i always wondered if lala was actually any good for the mainstream artist. i would think not, i was surprised to see it succeed without intervention from the RIAA...

Unknown said...

I suspect you are correct in your assumption, especially judging from the comments Lady GaGa made about Spotify a few months ago. However, as an option for storing your own purchased music library in the cloud, and being able to access it from anywhere without having to lug around a physical drive, it seemed to be a good thing for listeners. Plus, Lala does have the rule that, if you don't own a copy of the song, you can only stream it for free once. It seems like people might end up buying tracks they want to listen to repeatedly.

I've never been completely sold on the viability of streaming, but there are some advantages to the idea of "storage in the cloud." We'll see what happens. If this is truly something that Apple is planning to incorporate into a future version of iTunes, it could be a win for listeners, with no adverse impact to artists.

Dexter Edge said...

Alas, poor Lala, we hardly knew ye.

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