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Apple buys Lala, kills it off, teaches geek tech pundits a lesson
April 30, 2010 by Beatweek
When Apple acquired a small streaming music firm called Lala late last year, some tech pundits who’ve believed all along that music rental services are the future (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary) proclaimed that it signaled that Apple was finally ready to junk its massively successful music sales strategy in iTunes, in favor of a rental model that has never worked in history of recorded music. Even Apple publicly stated that it had purchased Lala strictly because it liked the company’s engineering talent and wanted to acquire said engineers, the geek pundits kept at it about how it as all some kind of secret plan to shift iTunes to a music rental model However, to the surprise of no one but those pundits, Apple announced today that it is in fact shutting down the Lala service. The twelve people who were actually using it will each receive an equivalent about of iTunes credit to fulfill the services they had already purchased from the company.
When Apple first acquired Lala last year, this is exactly the scenario we predicted; we won’t say “we told you so” but then again nor are we expecting the geek tech pundits to back down on their continued insistence that music rental is the future despite the fact that the general public has already clearly indicated that music sales are the only business model in the music industry with any potential for mainstream success.
[...] won: it was obvious six years agoApril 30, 2010 Yet another digital music service has ceased to exist today, even as the iTunes Store continues to rake in a progressively larger chunk of overall music [...]