Reports indicate that Apple has purchased streaming music service Lala.
Apple isn’t usually known for purchasing other companies, preferring to build everything for itself, but news has come out in the past 24 hours that it has purchased Lala. The company does sometimes buy smaller companies, most of which go unnoticed, but the possible implications of this purchase are staggering.
If you haven’t heard of Lala before, it is a streaming music service that some people have referred to as the iTunes of the Web. It started off as a service where you could trade CDs with other users via the mail, and you could also “backup” up to 5,000 songs from your personal collection to its servers and then listen to the music from any computer with Internet access.
Late last year they added streaming capabilities that allowed you to stream any of the 8 million songs it had acquired a license to for one time, and then if you wanted to hear it again you could pay a minimal fee for unlimited streaming.
The news broke earlier today that the two companies were supposedly in talks, but by this evening it was being reported by The New York Times that the deal was actually completed. Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, told the newspaper that the company “buys smaller technology companies all the time, and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans.”
And that is where the excitement is coming from; what exactly are Apple’s plans for a streaming music company?
The reports say that Lala executives actually contacted Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president in charge of iTunes, about the possible purchase over concerns that the small company was not going to be able to turn a profit in the short term. Unconfirmed reports — which, really, all of this information is at this point — say that Apple got the company at a bargain basement price of $.50 on the dollar.
Now begins the speculation of what Apple with do with Lala’s technology. Many people have said for some time now that Apple should get into some sort of cloud computing based version of iTunes that would allow a user to play their music across all of their computers and mobile devices without needing to sync data constantly. Will they strip Lala down to its assets and do such a thing? Who knows, it is anyone’s guess at this point, but it would make sense.
Hopefully there will be some sort of official announcement soon, but this is Apple we are talking about here, a company famous for its secrecy.
