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Rumor: Lala acquistion to create "online locker" for music

by Chris Rawson Jan 19th 2010 at 7:30PM

We've covered speculation about Apple's acquisition of music-streaming service Lala in the past. General consensus has been that Apple is looking to use the service in a future version of iTunes, allowing users to stream their own music libraries to their computers, iPhones, and iPod touches from a remote server, thus freeing up memory space on the devices themselves.

Citing "a wide variety of insider sources," Michael Robertson, former CEO of mp3.com, claims that this speculation is correct. He says that instead of moving to a subscription-based model, Apple will indeed leverage the technology and resources of Lala to allow users to stream their music libraries from a remote server.

It will be interesting to see if Robertson and other analysts' speculations are correct. There are certainly some technological hurdles to surmount in letting millions of iTunes users stream billions of songs – my own music library is nearly 40 GB, which is twice the default data allowance on MobileMe – but licensing issues seem to be even thornier. While Robertson says that "...because users are in possession of the materials no new licenses are required from the record labels or publishers," for streaming content, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that your friendly neighborhood RIAA will disagree. However, if Apple can indeed make this streaming service happen, it will be a huge win for them, and more importantly, for us users.

[Via electronista]

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We've covered speculation about Apple's acquisition of music-streaming service Lala in the past. General consensus has been that Apple is...
 

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Richard Urwin

Psonar already offers unlimited cloud storage and streaming of your own music for free to any internet-connected device including mobiles (plus you can use it like iTunes to copy your music to and from all of your devices – not just those in Apple world.) Rich discovery and social features follow early in 2010. Check it all out at http://www.psonar.com/

January 24 2010 at 12:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
chirho

Only way this'd work is if it was like Spotify, i.e. sync music from the cloud to your device in the morning and listen to it all day without need for wifi/3g/edge. I know we have better 3g coverage here in the UK, but there's no way I could listen to an album without dropping signal every now and again.

But then I've had Spotify for a year or so now, why would iTunes Cloud be any better? And I'm only paying £10 a month for Spotify with access to millions of tracks

January 20 2010 at 8:22 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Myles

If Apple does launch an online locker, I'll wager it's only for songs you buy through the iTunes store.

January 20 2010 at 5:04 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Sebastian

I don't think just reading out tags and other tags will work. What keeps people from just renaming songs? They'd have to analyze every single song to see if it really is the song it claims to be. Otherwise I assume they'll have a lot of legal issues

January 20 2010 at 3:55 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tony

What a lot of people are missing is the on-going trend to lower and lower quality audio reproduction. CD was a great improvement over vinyl in 1982... but since then we have only gone down, to AAC, to MP3 and finally to streaming which can be as bad as 16kbps (giving an audio bandwidth of up to around 8kHz only).

What users and the industry needs is a replacement for the CD at higher quality, like lossless HD audio at 24bit/96kHz. That will not be streamed as no one can afford the internet bandwidth. Combine that with the extremely low cost today of storage (500GB for $100) and streaming makes no sense from a central database.

Of course it is interesting that Apple may want to be the world repository of all music but then they already have 25% of the market.

January 20 2010 at 1:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to tony's comment
digitalsedition

What people are more interested in is having access to the music they purchased (or just want to listen to) on whatever device they want to listen to it on 24x7x365. The general market doesn't know (or care for that matter) that audio compression is in place and most people honestly aren't listening to the content on platforms where it really makes a difference. Further still many of those people who do have the high enough quality equipment to discern the various differences don't have the ears to reliably be able to tell (as has been demonstrated a number of times with the general public).

While there will certainly be a market for people who want perfect reproductions of music at the highest bitrate possible on the best equipment possible, those people represent only a market niche and aren't generally tracked as a viable concern when generating product strategy or business models for the mass market.

January 20 2010 at 2:35 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tom

Exactly. Streaming audio sounds like junk. I played with Simplify and while I enjoyed being able to access anything from my 200+gb collection, I couldn't stand the terrible fidelity. Maybe a large number of people don't care but there is a larger-than-you-might-expect number that do, who are the ones who buy Classics and 64gb Touches.

January 20 2010 at 11:40 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jonvdveen

Did you just confuse "memory" and "storage?"

Tut tut.

January 20 2010 at 12:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Drooling Dog

Interesting. I dig the idea.

But, to play devil's (RIAA's) advocate...

What is the definition of "owned"? In possession of? Would they argue that a hard drive full of songs may not all have been legally purchased?

January 19 2010 at 11:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
John.B

Wasn't this the premise of MP3.com and their old download service? That they would verify you owned the CD by scanning what was in your drive, then allow you to download a pre-ripped MP3 of your album? IIRC, the record companies went after them with both barrels...

January 19 2010 at 10:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rob

In North America, use Grooveshark. You can play ANY music even if you do not own it. See www,grooveshark.com

If Apple only allows you to play music you bought, I do not know how it can compete against Spotify or grooveshark.

Apple hereo is a news flash --- Lala is Too Little, Too Late!!

January 19 2010 at 10:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Nathan Sweeney

How is this different from what Lala already does? I have a Lala account, I downloaded the app, it scanned my files and matched up the tracks I had to the ones they have, and I can access them now from anywhere. Then the tracks that Lala did not have were uploaded from my computer. Of my library, only about 30 tracks had to be uploaded, the rest were already in Lala's inventory.

I love the premise of Lala, I keep my songs on my local machine, but I can still listen to them anywhere when I am not on my machine, such as at work, streaming any song from my entire library. It's great.

January 19 2010 at 9:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Nathan Sweeney's comment
happywillow0

"How is this different from what Lala already does?"

Note, even the title says Lala acquisition. Apple bought Lala a while ago and it would be a great idea for them to integrate it with the iTunes music to bring the coverage to the cloud.

Although Apple hasn't done it now, we have cloud based steaming services as others have said. Spotify hasn't gotten to the US yet but seems to be promising and Grooveshark has a large library to stream FREE to anyone even if you don't own the song though they don't have any apps for mobile applications.

...It seems like acquisition was spelled wrong in the title of the post.

January 20 2010 at 10:54 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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