Apple only bought dying Lala for the engineers

Ever since Apple launched its iTunes Store in 2003, various geek pundits have openly speculated that the company would soon abandon its attempt at selling music in favor of a music rental model. And even seven years later, after Apple has proven digital music sales to be a highly profitable business model, while music rental has proven to be a failed model time and time again, those same pundits have still opined that an iTunes music rental service was somehow just around the corner. So when failing music rental service Lala concluded back in December that it wasn’t going to be profitable and decided to approach Apple about a buyout, Apple agreed to the acquisition so the ever-expanding company could add to its engineering roster.

But that didn’t stop those same pundits from looking at the failure of yet another music rental service and interpreting it as Apple, the only widely successful company in the history of digital music, getting ready to shift away from a music sales model which has been proven to work in favor of a music rental model which has been proven time and again to be a failed idea. And now that Apple has shut down Lala’s music rental service this month, a move that any dispassionate observer would have seen coming since the day of the acquisition, those same geek tech pundits have now declared that the shutdown of Lala is even more evidence that Apple is about to abandon its own successful business model in favor of Lala’s failed one. How can these pundits be so insistent on misinterpreting the blatant facts of the matter?

Seemingly the only conclusion is that these geek tech pundits are still so desirous of the opportunity to rent music that they’re willing to overlook every detail to the contrary in order keep their hope alive that Apple, the only company who’s shown any ability to succeed in digital music, will give them their rental service. Which is why this week’s shutdown of Lala, which almost no one was using, was met with cries of pain by geek pundits who saw it for what it was, and hoots of denial from those geek pundits who were able to convince themselves that it was reasonable that Apple would shut down its newly acquired music rental service in favor of launching it again later.

Why are geeks are so insistent that music rental is the future, even as years of evidence have mounted to demonstrate that no one outside the geekdom has any interest? Perhaps it’s just part of the fundamentally differing mindset between geeks and the mainstream. Geeks want a theoretically infinite choice of external monitors for use with their personal computer; the mainstream is increasingly embracing an all in one computer like the iMac. Geeks consider the App Store to be “closed” despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of apps from tens of thousands of developers; the mainstream considers the App Store to be wide open; what geeks call “open” the mainstream would refer to as anarchy. So while it’s unclear whether geek tech pundits (and all tech pundits are geeks) truly believe that the mainstream would suddenly want to swallow a music rental service after a lifetime of soundly rejecting the concept, or whether the geeks merely want such a service for themselves, it seems increasingly clear that while Apple won’t be launching a music rental service anytime soon to replace the failed music rental service that it just put out of its dying misery, every additional step that Apple takes in burying Lala will result in yet another round of headlines from geek tech pundits about how the move somehow represents Apple moving one step closer to finally getting around to shutting down the overwhelmingly successful iTunes Store and replacing it with an iTunes Rental Depot. But then that’s what bubble geeks tend to do.