It could well be that I’ve missed this analysis – goodness knows there are a few newsies and bloggers that follow Apple – but the main point of the Lala acquisition may have gone over their heads for one key reason: the folks initially reporting the story haven’t actually tried to use Lala.
One of the key reasons to register with Lala is the right to stream music that you own to any computer: a great service and potentially world-beating if you can make it happen on portable devices as well. (‘Ownership’ is defined as having a copy, regardless of how you might have acquired it.) The catch – and it’s a big one – is that you have to download a program from Lala that reads your MP3 library and uploads ID information from each of your files. If you have a large library, it’s an absurdly long process – I gave up in an hour with less than 5% of my collection read. Even for a modestly-sized library, the upload routine is still odious, time-consuming and puts the onus on the user to do too much work.
(Aside: Why is this legal now for Lala but when the original MP3.com had a similar service back in the early years of the decade it was immediately sued out of existence? That was even worse for the user; you had to download software and then insert all of your CDs for identification. At least in that model you had to prove you actually owned a physical – and presumably ‘real’ – CD. Puzzling.)
Apple, however, via its Genius feature in iTunes already knows what MP3s are in its users’ collections, which means it could be just a flip of a switch to allow users access to their music anywhere on any connected device. If the purchase price really is as little as $17mm (as Techcrunch reported today), this is a total bargain to bring down one of the chief barriers to quick leadership in the “Stream Music Everywhere” market – not to mention avoiding all the negotiations Apple would have needed to go through with the copyright holders.
Pandora, Mog, Spotify, Last,fm and everyone else in the market may have just been trumped. Lala’s current feature set added to iTunes takes Apple from nowhere to everywhere in single update for software that’s already ubiquitous. Small wonder that today’s gossip sees Pandora running like hell to expand its business into the car stereo market.