By: Gino Lattarulo
I am saddened by the news that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has purchased and is closing down the LALA.com website, which is an online music service that provided (free) the ability to upload your entire music library to their servers to have a cloud like iTunes experience. That in itself is no big deal. What really drew me to this web site was the cost structure to pay for music. A person could sample music from whatever artist they wish and then have the choice of downloading the entire collection in mp3 form for around $ 7.00 ( .89 cents per song ) or purchase the entire collection exclusively for online use for about $ 1.00 ( .10 cents per song). For a geek like me who has strayed from the shackles of tangible hardware players (except for my XM radio (NASDAQ:SIRI) and almost exclusively listens to music on the web, this was a perfect arrangement. I even have access to it in my car. Take a Netbook , FM transmitter, and Satellite Internet card and you are done. OK , so it isn’t CD quality stuff but it’s a small price to pay for an unlimited library of music. How long do we think it is going to be before the touch screen PC is manufactured into vehicles for this exact reason? Not very long once the networks have beefed up bandwidth to offset inconsistent buffering issues. In any case, I think we can all guess why Apple purchased this LALA company. They are squashing any threat to iTunes. Not that there is a huge contest of course. iTunes is obviously the king of the digital download land but cloud formats are quickly becoming the new sheriff in town and they are here to stay. If I had to hazard a guess, I think Apple wants to use this LALA cloud structure for the Itunes experience. If they are smart, they will. And we all know they are.
Enter Grooveshark.com.
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