Switched On: Apple's song remains the same
By Ross Rubin 
posted December 8th 2009 5:30PM
posted December 8th 2009 5:30PM
Lala's shifting strategies through the years may have led many to think that its recent acquisition by Apple would represent radical changes to Apple's music approach. Lala lives on a Web page, streams from the cloud, and gives users, including Google search users, one full free play of any song in its library. But Lala's business model was always, at its core, more like iTunes' than any number of streaming music companies -- from the custom radio of Pandora to the subscription downloads of Rhapsody. Those services, however, have long been better at Apple at fostering music exploration when compared with iTunes' 30-second samples.
While it reversed its emphasis on physical albums versus digital singles, Lala always believed in conferring permanent ownership of music just as iTunes does. Even its idea of a websong, the 10-cent single that can only be streamed from its site, was intended to be permanent digital property, and in fact could be "upgraded" to a downloadable digital music file for the difference in price.
Lala could eventually have a strong impact on how iTunes customers discover and store music, Those familiar with Lala's history know that the company already allowed consumers with large music libraries to access to their songs from the Lala site without having to upload many of them. That would certainly be a complementary feature to add to MobileMe. And of course there was Lala's long-discussed iPhone app, designed for offering any songs consumers had stored on its service, as well as full samples of Lala's library songs over wireless connections.
But, again, this was all in the name of driving transactions, not streams. In
Lala offers Apple a ready-made, Web-based consolidation of personal libraries and sampled music. |
As Apple steps up flirtation with the cloud, though, the question, though, is whether is whether single track sales will even last for decades more. Recently, mog.com relaunched as an all-streaming service for $5 per month, a price that was used by Yahoo! Music and Napster to drive sampling. Napster even enabled limited free downloads at that price. But Mog may be the most pure Web-based music acccess company yet. Like Lala, it enables you to save songs in an online library, but doesn't even sell its own music, instead acting as an affiliate to Amazon.com.
And those kind of affiliate relationships may indeed help explain why Lala would up as part of Apple. With the PC manufacturer having such a strong presence in the smartphone market, Lala would have had to sell through iTunes on its iPhone app. Lala's technology can do a better job of leading consumers to the store, but Apple will continue to ring up the majority of the sales.
Ross Rubin is director of industry analysis for consumer technology at market research and analysis firm The NPD Group. Views expressed in Switched On are his own.
I was saddened to hear that Apple bought Lala. I assume they will assimilate it into their collective.
I wonder how Lala's business model was an "abhorrence". I wonder if that's what the author even meant given the rest of this poorly written article. I'm tempted to think that this is a conniving prelude to another blog post claiming victory for Apple in resurrecting the abhorrent Lala.
Then again I'm not convinced digital downloads are superior in any way to physical media. Lala was nice because I could use the service without bending over backwards for it. My formula is simple: buy a CD and a shirt at the concert.
@SuperEggo He's saying (fairly clearly within the rest of the paragraph) that the current (or most recent) version of LaLa would have made the minds who created the original version of LaLa scream in anguish.
Actually, during the run up to LaLa 2.0 (I would guess we're up to 3.x at this point), there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the CD trading forums. The effective death of a trading system that glorified the album has a "complete" document in favor of an a la carte music storage and streaming system was a bastardization of the original "ideals".
If not an "abhorrence," it was certainly "abhorrent" to many.
Apple's iTunes facebook page just launched iTunes gifts on facebook which is very similar to what Lala offers on facebook!!!
Endgadget,
This article, about an important topic, is unreadable. Could you have Ross stop by the 9th grade writing lab after school today? I think he missed a lesson or two.
//Or as Ross would write....
Lala article although is good not yet bad make happy music sad although.
By far the most important thing about Lala is the ability to move your entire library to the cloud--this has nothing to do with "purchasing" anything through Lala, streaming or otherwise. Of my 40K songs, 30K were matched by Lala and are now available to me wherever I have a web browser. This is undeniably awesome. If this becomes a part of MobileMe (the most backwards, overpriced, antiquated thing that Apple does), I'll be exceedingly sad.
and some people bitched at me for being too hard on the writers in the past. im sure drumwiz will love this article, its right up his alley!