Apple Buys Lala.com — "La, La, La," I'm Not Hearing Your Acquisition
The entrepreneurial food chain in the U.S. seems to consist of five steps:
- Hit upon good idea
- If well-connected, seek venture capital backing
- Build modest business with real customers
- Sell idea to a large firm, buy yacht and bigger flat screen TV.
- Watch idea disappear into corporate digestive tract, never to emerge
So it may be a similar fate with the web-based music delivery platform, Lala.com.
A few months ago I became a customer of lala.com. I was also a Rhapsody customer of many years, but not a frequent iTunes user and what I discovered by using these sites, was that lala.com incorporated the best features of a web-based platform.
Lala.com supports customer-provided libraries. You can upload your legitimate MP3, then use their servers to stream it to your desktop through a web browser. You can also add to your library by purchasing licensed, stream-only songs for $.10 a song. If after many listens, the song's appeal has endured, buy the MP3 for $.79 cents or so.
The site also features social networking features, such as those pioneered by last.fm and others; songs liked by others can be songs not otherwise discovered. But this party may soon come to an end, as it was announced on December 5 that lala.com was to be purchased by Apple.
According to the Reuters story, founder Bill Nguyen and his venture-backed team had acquired 100,000 customers and developed a catalog of 8 million songs, but what interested Apple was one possible way to offer iTunes content through a streaming platform. The current iTunes model is a download model only.
As the media-friendly saying goes, "terms of the deal were not disclosed," but recent moves by MySpace Music and the EU's Spotify may have figured into what may have been an attractive proposition for lala.com's backers.
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