Apple picked up streaming music site Lala media last year. At the time, the rumors were that Apple would release a cloud-based iTunes. While Apple has still not made any announcements around the future of Lala, yesterday saw the company discontinue the Lala service.
This is not a surprise since Apple previously made mention of its plan to shut down the service as of May 31st. However, with no replacement announced it does make the world wonder what Apple is up to.
At the time of the acquisition, it was reported that sources close to the deal claimed that the acquisition was made so that Apple could get Lala’s engineers. That may indeed be the case but my guess is that Apple is going to take bits and pieces of the software and roll it out in stages. Then again, it may just launch Lala as it once was, but now integrated with iTunes. After all, the company has a nice deal going with Pandora, which offers a similar service.
I’m definitely a fan of having my music available to me “in the cloud”. What I’d really like to see is iTunes sniffing my music collection and then making those same tunes available to me to listen to anywhere. It definitely sounds like a nice extension for both the MobileMe service, and a fantastic iPhone or iPad App. Perhaps we’ll see something at Apple’s WWDC next week?
