About a month and a half ago a friend turned me onto a music site that I had heard of before, but never visited called Lala.com. The site offered a sort of music rental service where you paid money to have songs made available to you via the Lala website. While I am not really interested in purchasing digital copies of music online, Lala offered another service that was completely fantastic. Using an application that you downloaded from the site, Lala would scan the music files on your computer, match up the song files with songs in its database, and make those songs available to you via Lala.com! Awesome! Now it didn’t matter if I forgot to bring my iPod to work. I could just login to Lala.com and bam! Music like magic. I spread the word about Lala to friends of mine who I thought would appreciate having access to their home music libraries elsewhere. The response was resoundingly positive and we were all so pleased until I checked my email May 1, 2010 and found this:
WHY???!??!?!?!? Weren’t we happy? Didn’t we still laugh? All this time you had been seeing Apple behind my back . . . treacherous snake of a Lala.com!
Well, no one was really sneaking around I suppose. In December 2009 Apple purchased Lala.com, though it didn’t really give a solid reason why. Apple did say that it was interested in Lala.com’s engineering talent and technology, though no further comments were made by either company regarding plans for the future. Rumors circulated claiming that Apple was ready to pursue alternative methods of music delivery (a method other than downloading) or that it was looking to join the cloud-based services effort. Both of those reasons seem . . . reasonable.
Truth be told, it was only a matter of time before Lala got the axe. Other music streaming sites like Rhapsody and Napster offer less complicated, but essentially the same services, for a price. Both Rhapsody and Napster offer monthly fee-based plans that provide the subscriber with unlimited access to a specific number of songs (in the millions) and also the opportunity to purchase authorized copies of songs they want for keepsies. Users on Lala enjoyed access to their matched music collections without paying anything, which is a pretty good deal. Lala also lets you listen to any album once. I am listening to Casino Twilight Dogs by Youth Group for the first time right now, as I type this to you. What a wonderful way to decide if an album is worth some dollars. Let’s face it though, if I am going to put any money toward this record it’s either going to be through Amazon or at one of the few remaining record stores in my neighborhood, not renting it on Lala. I guess that makes me part of the problem :-/
With or without Lala.com there still seems to be interest in streaming music. In the AppStore there are several streaming music applications to choose from. The Pandora app works just like Pandora.com, but there are other apps that stream directly from your computer to your iPhone or iPod Touch like StreamToMe (OSX only!) and Dot.Tunes which offers additional features like remote-control abilities. While these applications focus primarily on mobile devices, they still have a personal-collection focus, which is what was initially attractive to me about Lala.com.
Regardless of what is available now, I am still interested in what the future holds for streaming music and media. I think it’s fair to guess that Apple might adopt a similar plan to those of Rhapsody and Napster, except Apple has the iTunes element which could really make things interesting. Would I pay $10 a month to have 9 million songs available to me online on Rhapsody? Mostly likely not. But how much would I pay each month to have Apple stream my iTunes library into the internets?
