Lala Goes Bye-Bye

By  |  Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 8:23 am

It’s June 1st, and it’s official: Apple has shuttered Lala, the wonderful music service which it bought back in December. Analyzing Apple’s motivations and predicting its actions is usually a horrible mistake, but I would think that the fact Lala went away a week before a Steve Jobs WWDC keynote is not a promising sign–if Apple was prepping to turn Lala into iTunes.com, wouldn’t it want to turn all those Lala subscribers into charter members of the new service rather than telling them their accounts are no more? I could, of course, be wrong–and I hope I am.

 
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  1. Fred Says:
    June 1st, 2010 at 8:48 am

    I never believed for a second that Apple was going to use Lala to create a streaming iTunes.com that was similar to Lala. If rumors about the new Apple TV are to believed, that seems more likely – buy content from Apple, and they’ll stream it to you from the cloud, rather than requiring local storage. But nothing free, and no subscription service.

  2. Kent Says:
    June 1st, 2010 at 8:59 am

    I don’t understand why analysts tie themselves in logical knots trying to ascribe noble business motives to an obviously ruthless business decision. Apple bought LaLa with the express intent to kill a competitor. Sometimes a company will buy another company for its customers. They will convert the customers and then kill the company. Apple doesn’t see the need to convert LaLa customers. If they go to another small web-based music site in droves, Apple will buy/kill that one, too. It doesn’t cost much and is simpler than integrating the bought-out company.

    And what happens to LaLa employees? Who cares? Much simpler just to be rid of them.

  3. Paul Judd Says:
    June 1st, 2010 at 10:08 am

    Exactly what service did iTunes offer that compared with LaLa? LaLa just supported streaming music from tracks that you purchased. If Apple wanted to kill a competitor, they would have purchased a larger company.

  4. Harry McCracken Says:
    June 1st, 2010 at 10:24 am

    Seems like Apple has the luxury of not having to ruthlessly crush the competition in this case–its marketshare for digital music is already crazy high. And Lala, good as it was, was a small player.

    Also, if the goal is to eliminate competition, firing all the people who built Lala, thereby freeing them to compete again, doesn’t sound like a great strategy.

    I don’t know about the current whereabouts of Lala’s staff, but back when Apple made the purchase the conventional wisdom was that it was buying the company in part for the talent.

    –Harry

  5. Dean Says:
    June 16th, 2010 at 7:49 am

    Ha ha ha.
    Lala killed the goose that laid the cd swapper’s golden egg. It was a very cool community of cd swappers in it’s infancy and middle age. When they “upgraded” and deep sixed the cd swapping in favor of MP3 sales they sealed their fate. If the original model of cd swapping was flawed or ultimately not profitable, why didn’t they figure a way to reconfigure it? Music Boomerang has a decent group from the original Lala swapping cd’s but not with the volume or frequency. RIP Lala, you fell on your own sword with Apple’s help……..