Sam Oliver
Lala users will be able to access and play all of the music in their collection through May 31, 2010. As of Friday, WEb songs, wallets and gift cards are no longer available for purchase on Lala. Users can no longer upload their own songs, and new users are not being accepted.
Users who bought Web songs through the service will receive an iTunes Store credit in the amount of Lala song purchases. Those who have an outstanding wallet balance on May 31 will also be issued an iTunes credit for that amount. Lala said it will also write customers a check if requested by May 31.
Any unredeemed Lala gift cards must be utilized by May 31. The money will be added to the wallet balance, and can then be transferred in the form of a credit at the iTunes store.
Refunds will be calculated on May 31, and will be issued no later than June 14.
Late last year, Apple purchased Lala for $85 million. At the time, it was said that Lala's executives were set to play "significant roles" in Apple's iTunes strategy going forward.
In addition to selling songs and offering free streams of content, Lala allowed users to upload their own, separate music from their hard drive. If the content matched with licensed songs to which Lala owned the rights, the service allowed users to stream their music from the service, even though it was acquired elsewhere.
Just before Apple bought Lala, it introduced iTunes Preview, a browser-based list of content available from iTunes. Weeks later, iTunes Preview was expanded to offer song sampling within the browser, without running the iTunes desktop client.
Some expect that the acquisition of Lala will lead to an iTunes cloud that allows users to stream and access their purchased content from anywhere. Such a service could allow users to listen to their music from a variety of Internet-connected devices, even without a copy of iTunes installed.
AppleInsider Staff
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
Andrew Orr
Andrew O'Hara
William Gallagher
33 Comments
Wow. A few thoughts on this. First, I signed on with LaLa when I heard Apple bought them and have been loving the service, so it's sad to see it go. But, I will be very happy if Apple replaces it with an even better service (maybe still with web songs?). I'll misss the abilities of Lala when it's gone and hope Apple has something really great in store for us. That said, the iTunes gift card offer was a very nice gesture, and here's toasting to the future!
This should be a taken as a lesson, buy and download your songs immediately in a neutral DRM-free format and make plenty of backups.
Who knows who or what will happen with your digital music, subscriptions, gift cards or accounts, it´s a changing environment.
People should be reminded that at the RIAA request, Apple has been tagging one´s iTunes purchased music with user identifiable information.
Does anyone know if Apple extends this to pre-existing music or cd rips?
This should be a taken as a lesson, buy and download your songs immediately in a neutral DRM-free format and make plenty of backups.
Who knows who or what will happen with your digital music, subscriptions, gift cards or accounts, it´s a changing environment.
People should be reminded that at the RIAA request, Apple has been tagging one´s iTunes purchased music with user identifiable information.
Does anyone know if Apple extends this to pre-existing music or cd rips?
So how many people have been prosecuted with help from the metadata linked to Apple AACs? Seriously. If you don't aggressively share your music, what's to worry? Sending a file to a friend is not "aggressively sharing". Linking your entire library to your eDonkey client or indiscriminately creating torrent files can be, depending on your bandwidth and the popularity of the tracks. If you're uploading entire new albums en masse to Rapidshare with public access or posting links in HTML, perhaps you should worry.
Ok.
Was there any real point for Apple to keep the service going?
Hm... i tunes cloud to listen to YOUR own songs without them being on your device.
1. Either for mobile users or those who don't have iTunes.
2. For mobile users, iProducts offer itunes and wasting data to listen to your own collection on the go is not very productive.
3. There is pandora and last.fm that are very popular and allow you to listen to the "radio" and discover new music.
4. That leaves android devices that don't really have a default music store, but then again are not very likely to use iTunes.
One use can see is ability to download (pay for) music without the need to download iTunes, but that could have been done without Lala. What am I missing?