Lala bought by Apple, streaming iTunes Store around the bend?

I don't see Apple doing a all you can eat like Zune or Netflix. Which is a shame. They would gather a high amount of business though their to controlling to let that happen. I don't like paying per song because I"m also so random in what I want to hear. By the end of the month by bill would be extremely high.

Joachim-
The word is minuscule not "miniscule."

I didn't know about Lala until this news came out yesterday, but I have been wanting a service like this for years. I signed up, downloaded the Music Mover and let it run overnight. Now I can access "my" music library from any computer with a web browser without actually having to connect back to home computer.
I am anxious to see what Apple does with this purchase. It would be great if they expanded the service to include video as well? Truly iTunes anywhere.

Since I subscribed to Spotify I've hardly touched itunes (except for downloading podcasts). Hopefully Apple don't feel they have too much money / market-share invested in the download only option. They need to constantly adapt to new tech or they run the risk of becoming just another stubborn music industry dinosaur.
Not sure if its going to be enough to lure me back to the bloated i-tunes store but I'm cautiously optimistic that the hook up with Lala is a good move for Apple.

effect.

I am just fed up with all this discussion about downloading or streaming. The quality of the audio is very poor in both cases.

Time to get back to a decent service delivering, at least, CD quality audio (16bit/44kHz AIFF or FLAC) and then add on premium downloads of HD quality (say 24bit/96kHz FLAC). Everyone's conception of music today is being murdered by the boom box services that lack fidelity.

Time to move the industry forwards, kill the CD delivery chain and bring downloads forward. Then get higher quality audio into the main stream

Lala had the best prices on the internet for music, by far. Most tracks were $.89 and most albums were $7.49. I went from being a 100% torrenter to actually spending close to $70 in the past month, just because I felt like their prices were actually reasonable. And I absolutely LOVED the full preview feature. I was hoping for a Lala iPhone app, I didn't know they had one that close to production.

If Apple takes away what makes Lala great, it'll just be straight back to torrents for me.

And to think, if we could remove the labels, artists could charge $3 for an album and make $2.20 more than they do now on a $10 album.

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.

@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.

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.