Filed under: Apple Corporate, iTunes, Apple, Music
Lala bought by Apple, streaming iTunes Store around the bend?
Earlier today, Greg Sandoval at CNET reported that Apple was in talks to buy out music-streaming service Lala; his piece suggested that these talks were in advanced stages, and a deal could happen at any time -- Apple just needed to sign on the dotted line.As of this evening, Sandoval's rumor is looking a lot more like a done deal. The Wall Street Journal and the NY Times are both confirming that Apple has pulled the trigger and spent a minuscule fraction of those billions in cash on Lala. No numbers were announced, but the WSJ notes that an investment of $20 million in Lala from Warner Music Group was written down by more than 50% earlier this year.
Why Lala for Apple? The AP noted that Lala co-founder Bill Nguyen demoed an iPhone app in October that allowed 'intelligently cached' songs to be streamed to your iPhone, with the recently-streamed songs replayable even outside of cell coverage areas; Wired suggests that Lala's bundle-payment setup, where users buy stream credits, could save Apple's iTunes Store millions in credit card fulfillment charges. The deal is expected to put Nguyen and the Lala engineers on Apple's payroll, although the Times notes that Lala's agreements with the labels to stream music are non-transferable.
Lala's model for music streaming is an interesting one; the service scans your hard drive for songs you already own and lets you stream them at will, taking the concept Apple's also providing with Home Share to the Web (other services also let you share media between iTunes instances). You can also choose to stream songs you don't already own for $0.10 a piece, and 'upgrade' to a downloadable version at will.
Lala also recently made an agreement with Google to offer music previews in Google searches, greatly expanding Lala's reach. It's not clear whether Apple's purchase will have any affect on that arrangement
Is this a streaming service you would like to see come to iTunes? Leave a comment below and let us know!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
ABCNEWSER.com said 10:42PM on 12-04-2009
Recently played songs can be played outside of cell-coverage areas?
I can see AT&T making a bunch of commercials about this.
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Josh said 10:51PM on 12-04-2009
To me, this is the best possible model. I get my music on my hard drive, which I "own", yet I can always take it with me, since I have it the cloud. For Apple, they can design cool new iPods without large storage, making the button (no buttons, just a real clothing button) iPod a reality.
The most important piece though is the fact that it backs up your music collection to the web and allows unlimited re-downloads so that if you lose music locally, you always have another copy.
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tec2030 said 11:20PM on 12-04-2009
I am personally against this, I want lala to stay separate from iTunes because I don't want Apple to put their .m4a (or whatever the frack that filetype is) hands all over it....
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Bootes said 4:48AM on 12-05-2009
Apple is DRM free now, the files are just in AAC the successor to MP3.
LoganT said 6:24AM on 12-05-2009
I wish all media players supported AAC, considering it is the successor to MP3 and is a ubiquitous format. Also AAC isn't an Apple format.
Jordan said 10:45AM on 12-05-2009
,m4a is like blu ray. Most people don't see the need for it and are qute happy with their previous generation format that can be played anywhere on any device.
Ben said 4:49PM on 12-05-2009
Yes, but unlike Blu-ray it's a digital format not requiring new hardware.
Jordan said 6:13PM on 12-05-2009
Yet still not playable on devices that can't decode it.
oddEvan said 11:20PM on 12-04-2009
Seriously. I can see Apple giving Lala a facelift and rebranding it as "Mobile iTunes" or "iTunes Pass" or something like that. Though they probably won't be able to just re-launch the service as-is. If they really do have to re-negotiate the streaming deals, you KNOW the record labels are going to try to squeeze every last penny out of Apple that they can... /sigh
But as someone excited about Lala's promise, this new development makes me very happy. :)
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drstrudel2 said 11:29PM on 12-04-2009
I personally feel that this will either make the iTunes store perfect, or assassinate the best parts of Lala, and keep the junk. I want Apple to offer cloud based storage for all the stuff you buy, plus storing it on your hard drive, have full song previews(the best part, I love Lala to death for that), and drop the stupid credits. I couldnt stand those.... I just want to have my songs on the web.
BUT if apple just takes a tiny feature of it and junks the whole thing, I'll be livid. I'm personally surprised Apples the one to grab Lala... I was sure it'd be Google. Cloud based and giving stuff away sounds quite familiar....
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Dano said 11:29PM on 12-04-2009
Funny that two people read this as 'backing up music to the cloud'. I didn't read it that way at all, rather, I see it as a service integrated into your own personal iTunes collection sitting on your own personal hard drive, and streaming that music from your hard drive "through" the cloud to your personal device (iPod/iPhone). Either way, the more interesting piece for me was the streaming subscription - yes, I for one would probably do that. There is music I am curious about and would like to listen to in order to decide whether or not I'd like to purchase. Current models give a 10-15 second clip, but that's rarely enough and often misses some unique hook or something in the song itself - this way, I can hear the entire piece and make a better decision about purchasing.
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caskey said 11:42PM on 12-04-2009
If there wasn't redundancy between your hard drive and a 'cloud' copy, wouldn't the service require that your main iTunes computer be on, awake and connected to the internet at all times? You wouldn't be able to load something onto your iPhone unless your computer was sitting at home ready to stream it to your device. I carry my laptop with me most of the time and it's my only machine. Something about that setup doesn't really have the "It just works" feeling that Apple tries to go for with these types of services.
Dano said 11:52PM on 12-04-2009
@caskey: Well, I thought about that, but what made me think otherwise was the comment about how LaLa's service "scans your hard drive". Following that link reveals "matches the songs on your computer to Lala's licensed catalog", which means LaLa see's what you have, compares it with what they're licensed to play, then streams what you can hear from "their" copy. There's no backup of our iTunes music "in the cloud", it's LaLa's music that is in the cloud.
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caskey said 12:22AM on 12-05-2009
That's not exactly true. There is a piece of software called the La La Music Mover. After it scans your collection and compares what you have to what is already in their library, it takes any remaining tracks that it doesn't have and uploads copies to their servers.
http://www.lala.com/#musicmover/uploader
There's the page about it on their site. It's kind of brilliant because it doesn't waste the uploading bandwidth to copy everything and keep multiple member's copies of the same track on their system, but it still allows your entire library to be accessed. I have thousands of songs in my library, but La La only had to copy a couple hundred of my tracks (either mislabeled to the point where they couldn't find a match or original compositions or recordings) to their service.
Dano said 5:35AM on 12-05-2009
@caskey: So, does that mean that if you (or I, or anyone) lost their iTunes library too some catastrophic event (disk crash, etc), they could just re-download it from LaLa?
Bootes said 1:52PM on 12-05-2009
Well currently LaLa only allows you to stream your music from their site, not redownload it.
Dano said 3:00PM on 12-05-2009
That was my impression too Bootes - above, Josh said that the important thing for him was that his music was backed up in the cloud and he would have unlimited downloads - I didn't read it that way.
caskey said 3:26PM on 12-05-2009
That may be true, but this is assuming that Apple will just leave the service running as is. It's simply a matter of allowing you to download the tracks which would be a simple task for their programmers. With La La as it is, one could potentially just download their tracks over and over again to countless computers. However, if integrated as an iTunes service, Apple could allow backup copies to be downloaded to only authorized computers for the iTunes account it's associated with. Users can authorize up to 5 computers (or is it 3? I forget) to play their files. I know that's a moot point now that the DRM is gone, but videos still use that limitation so it's functionality is still there. While you might be able to play the files on as many computers as you want now that DRM is gone, it doesn't mean Apple can't limit downloading from the cloud to only authorized computers.
Dano said 4:37AM on 12-06-2009
Wow. The whole thrust of this (I thought) was to stream your authorized music to a device (computer, iPod, whatever) as well as having a model for subscribing to in order to listen to additional music you may be interested in, but not currently own.
I don't see this as a back up service, and as far as what Apple (or anyone) "could" do, I say no shit Sherlock! Apple "could" do anything they wanted, to include making the current iTunes a subscription model if they wanted to - obviously they haven't, or at least, they haven't found the best model for Apple to implement yet. But this article (nor this discussion) isn't about what they "could" do.
Apple "could" allow iTunes itself to work the same way (allow unlimited downloads to authorized computers), but it doesn't. Besides, most people (possible assumption here) have more music in their iTunes Library than that which they've purchased through iTunes alone (i.e., purchases through other online music services such as Amazon; music ripped from their own purchased CDs, etc).
The bottom line: Apple's purchasing LaLa will in no way create an instant personal iTunes Library backup in the cloud. I think that if you lose your main library, the one on your computer that Lala is linked into, then all you're going to be hearing, no matter what service you use, is digital hiss...
Ben said 11:56PM on 12-04-2009
This has tremendous potential for greatness and for ruin.
If Apple integrates Lala's services into iTunes and/or MobileMe, then I could see this being a great thing.
However, if Apple did this just to pick up some great programmers and to knock off a potential competitor then I'm going to be shopping at the Amazon MP3 store even more.
The Lala iPhone App was so close to release, I hope it still comes out. It's pretty ironic that currently the only songs that I don't have access to on Lala are the DRM'ed iTunes songs that I've purchased, and depending on what happens here they might be the only songs that I'll be able to access in the future.
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