Slashdot Mirror
Apple Buys Lala Music Streaming, But Why?
Apple has snapped up music streaming biz Lala in what many initially thought to be a move to step beyond the strict download market of iTunes. On closer inspection it seems that Lala was a somewhat less-than-ideal target and Apple may just be gunning for ready-made engineering talent. "On balance, the purchase appears to give Apple the chance to bring in engineers that will be useful now, and could be even more so if it chooses to enter streaming or subscription services. But, for the moment, there's nothing about the purchase that seems to provide the company with any key technologies it was missing in terms of diving into markets. Until another company demonstrates that there's money to be made (or iPods to be sold) through streaming, there's no reason to think that a move of this sort is imminent."
Lala.com is the most frequent entry in the Google Audio search for searches I've done. If Apple can control Lala, they can largely control or hamper Google's competition against iTunes.
Does there need to be a more complex explanation than simple competitive pressures?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Ah yes, the purchase of Lala will not, therefore, make Apple present throughout the universe.
Google Search for any song online via Google and Lala brought a stream right to you. First listen is free, after that you have to pay. Why would Apple buy them? Considering most sane people use Google and Lala doesn't require something like iTunes, Lala was in a better position to bring music people want directly to them. This is just eliminating the competition before they got too big. Can I get an Antitrust Amen?
WTF? Bad Fark - get out!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Perhaps for specific iPhone/iTunes streaming video?
"Competition is sin." -John D. Rockefeller
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Lots of assumptions without much meat from sources that didn't really have much insight into the deal. The engineering talent angle might have been a serendipitously correct guess, but I don't see Apple in much of a position to have to make bad deals for itself. They could have bought tech or licensing that might be useful to their future plans that they seem really good at hiding.
P.S. I think where the article uses "immanent" the author was too busy spinning conjecture to see that he meant "imminent."
The initial NYT article about the acquisition said it was only talent related, while a more recent Reuters article has the following quote:
The truth is, nobody really knows what Apple is up to. Which is, of course, just how Apple likes it. I wouldn't put it past them to have deliberately leaked a couple of conflicting stories just to keep everyone guessing.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Immanent...I don't think that word means what you think it means.
iTunes runs on Windows. How would making it iTunes-only restrict it to the Mac platform?
How did this get modded insightful?
Right now, I have iTunes that I use to update my iPod and LaLa which I primarily use to listen to music when I'm on ANY web connected computer. I use LaLa over iTunes at home because I have streams for some songs that I have a paid license to listen to on LaLa that I didn't pay the extra 79 cents to download, so they aren't available in my iTunes.
With LaLa, if I have an internet connection, I can listen to my songs and streams from anywhere, which means I don't need copies of all of my MP3s (or whatever) on my laptop, my work machine, my home machine, etc. It's amazing, and stream licenses are only 10 cents per song.
LaLa also provides a music mover app, which watches my iTunes directory and automatically unlocks the streams in LaLa of the tracks of whatever CD I just imported on iTunes.
Suffice it to say, I love it, and if they integrated the two products, I'd love it even more.
--"insert clever quote here"
Well, for cool people, it would restrict it to the Mac platform....
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Is Google competition for iTunes?
I've honestly not ever heard that before.
Google is competition for everything, it's just a matter of how soon.
It's a dessert topping and a floor polish.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That would make a pretty good name for a startup company.
I think however you look at it, you have to see Apple trying to reinforce their dominant position as the largest music distribution outlet in the world. Engineering talent my ass. It's about stronger control over the marketing and distribution of music.
PS: Do I get any extra points for saying both 'ass' and 'buttress' ?
iTunes runs on Windows, but it would be very Apple to put features in the Mac iTunes and exclude them from the Windows one.
Here's a cookie... *psst* it's MAGIC
Really cool people aren't defined by their software choices.
Lala offers a feature that lets you upload your iTunes library and keep it synced; I always described it as "like having access to your iTunes library from anywhere online," so I can see Apple being interested from that angle.
1. Buy the patents
2. Compete with Spotify
Of course not. They're defined by their hardware choices. . . at least if they're seen with a Zune.
I kid.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Tinky Winky, Dipsy and Po?
iTunes runs on Windows, but it would be very Apple to put features in the Mac iTunes and exclude them from the Windows one.
It would? Do you have any examples of Apple doing this sort of thing in the past? iTunes is to sell iPods and iPhones. Most of those people use Windows. Has the Windows version of iTunes aver lacked feature parity with the Windows version?
Hopefully this means we will have better samples before buying online. I am tired of searching for an album on Amazon, being curious, and finding the 30 second samples don't really help me, especially when the samples are TERRIBLE bitrate and overcompressed. More and more bands are offering the entire album for streaming online so that prospective purchasers like myself can get a real taste of the album before buying it.
Well that motive makes sense if Apple wanted to dominate music distribution. The main reason Apple got into online distribution was to increase the sales of their products. They have been able to dominate only because they offer a richer ecosystem than competitors.
According to Apple's 10-K, Apple had revenue of $36.5 billion for fiscal year 2009 (ended September 26, 2009) of which $4.0 billion was in the division regarding iTunes store, iPod services, and iPod accessories. There was no breakdown into iTunes store itself but music represents definitely less than 11% of revenue for Apple. In terms of cost, music represents the lowest margin product for Apple. Of the 99 cents they charge for each DRM'ed music file, Apple has to pay the labels 70 cents. Apple only keeps 29 cents which goes to maintain iTunes store, payment systems, etc. For non-DRM'ed music, I'm sure Apple doesn't get any more percentage wise. So after all costs, it would appear Apple makes very little profit from music.
The windows version of Logic was dropped because it didn't make a lot of sense to keep developing it. Apple wanted to incorporate Logic into their suite of profesional products. The windows version would not have had the same features as the Mac version because Apple didn't have a suite. So either Apple develops two separate versions of Logic with different features or Apple would have to develop a new pro suite for Windows. Or they could drop the windows version.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I saw a Zune in a store once. When I got home, 5 people had unfriended me on FaceTube.
Now that's just pure, baseless speculation.
As far as I can tell the Mac and PC version of iTunes are the same, have the same feature set and have no Mac-exclusive features in the past or currently.
In terms of the iPod and iTunes and the iTunes Store, they have in fact done the exact opposite of what you claim they would do just because they're Apple, since the iPod, iTunes and the iTunes store used to be Mac -only.
How long will it be before the only way to access Lala will be to buy one of Apples overpriced mp3 players.
...supposedly agreeing to not enter the music business? I hope Apple Records sues their ass off for violating this agreement.
I think that as arrogant as one might say that Apple is, they have realized that the world of internet/asp services is much different than something that you totally control, in a closed environment of an OS. They learned that the hard way through the numerous shortcomings of Me, a service which was very ambitious, but today still remains very unrealiable and has numerous shortcomings in all categories (mail, calendar, contacts, photos, idisk) when you compare it with other free alternatives. When Me was initially announced, for a brief moment Apple had the chance to turn the market upside down, and be a leader in the ASP/cloud services arena. Today they are not even considered a strong player - Me remains a supplementary service for only a small part of the iPhone base of users. Consider what could have happened with Me if Apple had purchased a number of successful services (Yousendit, Dropbox, Plaxo, etc.) and combined them under one umbrella - their offering would be unmatched, they would have a brilliant team of developers, and today they would probably be leaders in the market. I believe that this is the basic thinking behind Lala's acquisition: they are buying time, which is the next best thing after money: they are buying time they have lost, against Lala.com, Last.fm. They are buying time that they would loose if today they began to develop their own streaming service. They are buying time that it would take them to learn the mistakes others did. With the cash reserves that Apple has right now, if it follows a clever acquisition strategy it can pretty soon gain a significant presence in internet, one that in time would rival that of Yahoo, Microsoft and perhaps even Google. If the rumors surrounding the recent sale of AdMob are true, it seems that Apple is implementing such a plan.
Has the Windows version of iTunes aver lacked feature parity with the Windows version?
I would have to say no.
1) defensive buy, but i doubt it. 2) to sell music outside itunes, why not?
Has the Windows version of iTunes aver lacked feature parity with the Windows version?
I'll assume the second "Windows version" is a Mac version - yes, the Mac version has Applescript support.
There are Mac only features of iTunes; however, they are exclusive to Macs because there is no real Windows equivalent. When syncing an iPod/iPhone in Mac, it will also sync calendar and contacts. Since calendar and contacts isn't part of standard Windows (Outlook or Lotus notes doesn't come with base Windows), it doesn't sync these.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
i think most people are looking at this in far too short sight. apple may have something up their sleeves that we have no idea of yet (just as they will have something come out (i think fairly soon) of their newton tech, which they kept when others offered to buy). we may not know for a few *years*. but they are pretty savvy on what they are doing.
- r
Now that's just pure, baseless speculation.
As far as I can tell the Mac and PC version of iTunes are the same, have the same feature set and have no Mac-exclusive features in the past or currently.
In terms of the iPod and iTunes and the iTunes Store, they have in fact done the exact opposite of what you claim they would do just because they're Apple, since the iPod, iTunes and the iTunes store used to be Mac -only.
More to the point, maintaining code for a GUI application on two totally different platforms like Windows and Mac is enough work as it is. About the only sane way to do it is to abstract the system-specific code to the bare minimum number of modules which hopefully hardly ever need to be touched - in which case you'd actually have to go out of your way to put features in one version that are absent from the other.
Maybe Apple did indeed buy them to get engineering know-how. Apple certainly don't know how to build a reliable appliance for media serving. I have an Apple TV. It is the most troublesome product I have every had, in any category. It "just doesn't work". I have to restart the thing about once a day because it gets "stuck" if it temporarily loss a connection. It is so, so, so fragile. It is awful. It is so bad that I started keeping a log of all the times that it freezes. And it doesn't even have a power button so you have to yank the chord out and plug it back in! In contrast, I also have a Roku, and it never, ever has to be restarted and never gets "stuck". It just works. I shudder to think what Apple's new media slate will be like....
"of which $4.0 billion was in the division regarding iTunes store, iPod services, and iPod accessories. . .Of the 99 cents they charge for each DRM'ed music file, Apple has to pay the labels 70 cents. Apple only keeps 29 cents which goes to maintain iTunes store, payment systems, etc. . .So after all costs, it would appear Apple makes very little profit from music."
Maybe if you only talk about profit in terms of percentages. . .
Granted, I don't know what the breakdown of that revenue comes from 'services and accessories' - possibly a significant portion. Still. . .
To make the math simple, let's just call .99 == 1.0 (yes, that introduces 1 percent error; I think that's close enough for a /. discussion - this isn't an audit).
4 Billion * .29 ~= 1.1 Billion
I don't know what it costs them to run the iTMS, but I have a hard time believing it would come close to a Billion dollars per year (maybe a hundred million?). I'm not sure about you, but where I come from, a Billion dollars of profit is pretty significant. Of course, that simple calculation is based upon the assumption that all 4 Billion comes from the music side, and you're probably correct that a good chunk of that comes from Accessories, which according to your argument (which I do find mostly reasonable) will generally have a higher profit margin.
Still, my point is, even though Apple doesn't make much money *per track*, they sell a LOT of tracks. It does kind of add up after awhile. Plus, your premise that Apple is 'in the business' to sell hardware, services, and accessories is quite probably correct, the two goals aren't mutually exclusive. According to your own analysis, it stands to reason that the more Apple dominates distribution, the more hardware, services, and accessories they sell. So, from where I sit, Apple definitely *does* have interest/incentive to try to dominate music distribution - both to sell more of their 'own' products, and to increase the "Apple Tax" they collect on each track.
How this plays out with the Lala.com acquisition will be interesting to see. I could definitely see a possibility for Apple to try to maybe launch a streaming service for iPhones (and iPods with WiFi like the Touch). Apple Radio, anyone? Maybe they see an Apple Radio service as a way to let customers discover more music, which they then hope to sell as tracks on iTMS. Maybe just to give users one more reason to buy an iPhone/iPod instead of another device.
You buy your music from iTunes. It's locked to that computer. Then you go to your friend's house and want to listen to your music. This is the point where a streaming DRM service would be idea.
Alternately, the iPhone already has a number of streaming services, why not stream directly to your device from the cloud. Services like last.fm and pandora have streaming apps for the iPhone. This would put Apple in that market too.
maybe if you weren't whoring that book (yours?) out so hard, you wouldn't slip up and forget what site you're spamming...
Wait, Apple put DRM back on music? When did that happen?
I was unaware they ever switched away from the AAC (Apple Audio Crap) format, which is a built-in DRM.
AAC doesn't have built-in DRM. The encryption Apple used for AAC files sold via the iTunes store was a proprietary extension to the ISO/IEC AAC standard, if I understand correctly. VLC plays my AAC files, and the iTunes music store has been selling DRM-free AAC files for the better part of a year.
Advanced Audio Coding. It's part of MPEG4. Apple *HAD* used DRM, but it wasn't part of the AAC spec itself. Now (in the US) the music is DRM free and has been for some time.
LaLa owns WOXY.com. Maybe Apple just wanted to own the best radio station on the planet?
tinky-winky, po, and dipsy dot coms were not available at the right price.
Has the Windows version of iTunes aver lacked feature parity with the Windows version?
I'll assume the second "Windows version" is a Mac version
You assume correctly.
yes, the Mac version has Applescript support.
Well, yes I suppose. The OS X version will also let you grammar check the search field, but both that and Applescript are services offered by the underlying OS. Obviously Apple isn't going to re-implement all of OS X on top of Windows. One could claim the converse by pointing out the superior audio mixing output options available to Windows iTunes users.
Comments about your username aside :-), iTunes certainly *does* sync Outlook Calendar and Contacts on Windows. It will also alternatively sync the built-in Windows Address Book (yes, there is one) if you've configured it that way, and also syncs photos to the Microsoft Picture Viewer or whatever it's called. What it won't do is do all of this if the device is configured to use MobileMe and Outlook is configured to use Exchange. Of course, there is Exchange support too, which the company I work for has started supporting but I haven't desired to configure yet. Anyway, I did use this syncing up until I purchased MobileMe, which latter service is useful enough that I am willing to put up with the issue. Our company has MobileMe blocked anyway, or at least parts of it (iDisk support), so I can only use it off-network anyway. Of course I had to buy third party software to successfully sync my two Kyocera Palm phones, and was never able to get the blasted Palm Treo to sync at all (how I loathed that phone, and Verizon for forcing me to switch to it after dumping support for my month-old Kyocera).
Apple never, and I repeat never, does anything without a reason. You can bet the farm that Lala has something Apple wants or needs. More interestingly, when industry watchers cannot quite put their finger on whatever that might be, it usually means that experts are thinking inside the box, and Apple is thinking outside said box. ... it would help to know what that hardware was. Apple won't tell you.
If Lala has software or technology Apple wants, it's probably because buying it now will save time over developing it in-house. That's been a pattern in the past.
If Lala has contracts or agreements Apple wants, that points to a future business or an expansion of an existing business. Sometimes Apple goes into something obliquely, through a quiet channel that isn't under the magnifying glass like the mother ship inevitably is.
If Lala unknowingly has something that will fit with an existing or future Apple hardware project, well
And it may be as mundane as some suggest; that Apple want personnel to fold into a project they are working on. It's happened before as well.
Because of Apple's longstanding policy of not commenting on anything speculative, it might be hard to figure out the angle, even in the future; sometimes with Apple the cards are never laid on the table, and whatever it was quietly dies.
I'm most intrigued in the possibility that they are up to something that isn't obvious and can't be inferred from Lala's previous business. We shall see, I guess.
But, you can be sure there is something going on. More grist for the rumor mill!
I've been beta testing a Lala iPhone/iTouch app that let's me stream my entire Lala-synced iTunes library, plus and web tracks/albums I've purchase from lala.com. So I have my complete music library on my phone anywhere there's Wi-Fi or a data connection. Plays nicely with Facebook, too.
It feels a lot like a killer app to me. Maybe Apple thought it was too good to not bring it in-house.
First of all $4 billion for the division not just for iTunes. Second, that's revenue not profit. In many businesses, if the wholesale cost is 70% of revenue, the product is not going to make much profit. 30% left for overhead means the profit may be 5-10% if the business runs lean. So yearly that would put iTunes at $100 million profit maybe. That sounds like a lot but it isn't considering the amount of effort to acquire the profit.
Except Apple has done everything opposite to what you would expect if they were trying to gain more share. Converting their entire catalog to non-DRM'ed only helps their competitors. Apple sells music because their customers want it and no one else was going to help their customers.
Here's where the acquisition of Lala to remove a competitor doesn't make sense financially. How many much more in sales would Apple get in eliminating Lala? A few million maybe. That translates to tens of thousands in profit. And how much did Apple pay for Lala? If they spent $10 million, it would take decades to pay back.
If you look all the major acquisitions of Apple since Steve took control, every one was for a particular purpose or product, not to undercut competition as MS would do:
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Duh. When the reporter on NPR this morning was saying a whole album could be streamed for a $1.00, I laughed. No. Apple will just discontinue the service and eliminate competition. They couldn't CrunchPad these guys so they had to spend some money.
And the Windows version has COM interops (so, VBScript support).
Does either version have a graphic equaliser?
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
If you install Outlook, iTunes will sync calendar and contacts by the way.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I don't know about the Windows one, because I'm in the "iTunes on my PC over my dead body" crowd, but there's definitely a graphic EQ on the Mac one. I know this because my friend switched it on with some drastic setting to compensate for one particular tune once, forgot, and we spent a couple of hours wondering if his speakers were blown or something ;)
I thought she was happy right where she was. At least, I was always happy. Quick, Dr. Tiki, you'd better write a prescription!