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Digital Top Stories
Apple shut Lala.com
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 4 May 2010
Apple has announced they will shut down Lala.com, the streaming music whatnot they bought late last year, on 31 May. That news led to heightened speculation Apple would soon launch their own streaming music service via the iTunes platform, or through a widget to the iPhone, utilising Lala.com technology, though insiders say that that’s not true.
There has been much speculation as to why Apple snapped up Lala.com, a complicated digital music start up that had dabbled with various business models in its short lifespan. Some reckoned Apple were interested in Lala’s technology or content partnerships more than its actual platform and user-based. Others said they bought Lala.com simply to stop a rival like Microsoft or Google from snapping them up.
Or, a real conspiracy theorist might suggest, the purchase was simply designed to piss off their one time friendly and increasingly hostile competitor Google, whose ‘preview tracks within the search engine’ service in the US was part powered by Lala.com. Presumably Google OneBox will now rely on MySpace for all its streaming previews.
