apple buys music streaming service lala

07 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Confirmed on Saturday, Apple, the biggest internet music seller, has purchased Lala; a streaming music service.

Will users ultimately want music files on their own devices or left in the cloud? Most music services seem to be betting on one or the other (Spotify and Mog are two recent entrants for the streaming competition); so this move allows Apple to hedge their bet and potentially offer a subscription model to iTunes users for streaming services.

Lala began as a CD trading site, allowing users to trade discs by mail. Now they offer over 8 million songs due to deals with EMI Music, Warner Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and others.

Lala users already had the option of either streaming a song (for ten cents after the first listen) or downloading the song to their hard drive for 79 cents – I wonder if we’ll see this type of offer instituted in the iTunes store in the near-future?

iTunes operates in 33 countries, has about 11 million songs in the catalog, and has sold over 8.5 billion songs since 2003.