Slashdot Mirror
Apple To Shut Down Lala On May 31
dirk and a large number of other distressed readers let us know that Apple is shuttering Lala, the music service they bought last December, on May 31. "Apple will transfer any remaining money in a user's account to iTunes, and will credit users (via iTunes) for any web songs that were purchased. It's a real shame, as Lala was a much better music service, offering songs in straight MP3 format. Its web service was innovative and ahead of its time. And it was one of the few places that would let you listen to an entire song to sample it (after one complete listen, you then could only hear a 30-second sample)." Reader Dhandforth adds: "10-cent favorites will now cost 9.9x more. What's worse, a community of music fans (followers and followees) will disappear on May 31. Evil. Sigh."
...I know people who did, and none of them are happy about this. I've herad nothing but good things about Lala, it's a shame that it will be going away :/
Living With a Nerd
Because anyone actually thought that Apple was going to keep running two competing music stores?
Embrace
Extend
Extinguish
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
That is the correct usage
http://garyes.stormloader.com/its.html
You should get a refund of your money, not have it be transferred to iTunes.
What you agreed to pay for was Lala's service, not iTunes'.
Apple has always been more innovative than Microsoft. Their desktop OS has been years ahead of Windows for most of the past decade, and now their malicious business approach is beginning to surpass that of Microsoft's.
Or maybe it's just that their business model didn't work. Everyone's favorite companies are those that are giving free services and running at a loss, and then they complain when they turn to advertising, subscriptions, or just go belly up. iTunes is a sustainable business model, and Lala is not. Deal with it.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
If I have a car company, and I buy your smaller car company, I can merge your product into mine and remove the competition, thereby increasing my profits.
Sent from your iPad.
Yes, you are missing something. When you purchase a company, you get the assets, their Intellectual property (IP), employees (they can of course quit later), customers, etc. Apple can go and make ITunes better by using the IP they just acquired, or they can get the employees because they need more to work on their stuff and they like what LaLa did, they can continue to run 2 music stores and get the profit from both, or they can trash the one they bought and have a new customer base (customers are of course free to jump ship. Apple didn't seem interested in the tech, just the customer database. They have a bunch of new customers who had account credit with LaLa that is now ITunes credit. Some of the customers will request refunds, or spend it and jump ship, but a number of them will just accept it and start using ITunes.
Reader Dhandforth adds: "10 cent favorites will now cost 9.9x more. What's worse, a community of music fans (followers and followees) will disappear on May 31. Evil. Sigh."
Evil? Evil?
You keep using that word but I don't think you know what it means.
MP3 can be encoded at levels which achieve transparency - just like any other modern audio codec. While I'm not really up on what encoder and bitrates Lala used for its MP3 offerings, the notion that your music just sounds better than my mp3 library assumes that I am encoding MP3s at below-transparency levels, and that you are encoding your AAC, Ogg, or whatever lossy format at transparency levels, or that you are using a lossless codec and that somehow transparency "isn't enough".
This is incorrect, sir. MP3 as a format choice isn't the sole (or even main) criteria for most people who use it. MP3 is able to achieve transparency, its file sizes are reasonable (LAME encoding at v0 comes to mind), it's compatible with any hardware or software that one will encounter in the real world, and if your friend asks you for a copy of that latest Autechre album, you don't have to pontificate about how your chosen encoding format is better than their chosen encoding format, despite the fact that their software may not support it and their factory-included car CD/MP3 player most certainly won't. A 3% file size decrease with, say, Ogg, simply isn't compelling when it means putting up with the fact that a lot of hardware doesn't support it.
I'm here for the music. Give me transparency, and give me ubiquity. Your claim that you can achieve a better sound at "x" bitrate is not compelling when the file size of MP3 is not obscene, and when both formats can achieve transparency at a reasonable bitrate. Not having to pontificate about audio formats that hardly anyone actually uses? Hell, that's just icing on the cake.
Correction:
Steve jobs sticks his fat wads of cash in his ears.. "LALALALALALALALALA"
Miller Lite tastes like water that's somehow managed to rot.
Apple will introduce a streaming music service. Apple knows revolutionary ideas when they see them. They do have to renegotiate the licenses.
Am I happy? No.
But I realize there is evidence that Apple is launching such a service.
Buying and shutting down competitors is incredibly common, even if the competitor is losing money it can still make good business sense. You do it if they have some IP you want (a patent, for example), or if you're afraid they will set a poor legal precedent that will hurt you (Google buying Youtube), or if you just want their customer list.
Right. But those reasons don't apply well here. There doesn't seem to have been an IP issue. Not aware of any legal issues. I think iTunes has all the customer lists it needs.
Most likely reason here is the obvious - Apple paid Lala "Go away" money. Apple wants to be the predominant online music vendor, and they identified a company with a business model that could potentially threaten iTunes' market share. So they bought them and shut them down. The motive is obvious and there's nothing to be done about it.
Lala's streaming part of their business model may have had problems with paying for streaming rights
Doesn't pass the smell test. Recall that they were bought 6 months ago. Not years, months. How likely is it that their core business, which was worth $80M 6 months ago, is now worth $0? Note that Apple isn't even spinning it off, or selling the unit to someone else. I'm not aware of any IP or other considerations that pushes that current $0 value northward. They're just shutting it down and writing it off.
Again, there's only one reason that isn't completely stupid - the cessation of Lala's operation is worth more than $80M to Apple over the long term. From their standpoint, isn't $80M of insurance worth it if it helps you take out a promising young competitor before it's too late?
but for all practical purposes is useless outside of the iTMS walled garden.
What are you talking about? How is it useless? It plays on pretty much every modern software and hardware music player made. It plays on the frickin' Zune. Zen, Archos, Sansa, Sony, even the PSP. Songbird, Mplayer, WMP, and everything else I can think of.
Seriously, back in the day before anyone but Apple used it, it was a valid argument to say you wanted to use the more compatible .mp3 instead of the more efficient .mp4, but now I wonder what you're using that it isn't compatible with.
Now I might be missing something, but what did they gain through this acquisition?
Probably some slick little bit of code that Lala used in their streaming severs. $80 million is chump change to Apple and they no doubt did the math and figured it would cost them more to develop something similar in-house. Also, no worries about software patent lawsuits this way.
This ain't rocket surgery.
You agreed to buying it DRMd at the time. If you didn't like it you shouldn't have bought it.
No NO NO,
The Steve Job Icon needs to be the man on the big screen from the 1984 video.
Please stop spreading that lie. It has been demonstrated to be false. You can encode MP3 a a rate that is undetectable.
It can also encode at a rate that makes is sound like it's coming out of the bottom of a tin can.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Vergès: I believe that everyone, no matter what he may have done, has the right to a fair trial.
It's a sad day for the world when opinions like this are enough to make you "notorious"
Well......
I hear people objecting about media consolidation.[...] so they can control what gets shown or not shown on broadcast
Except the Internet is a totally different world.
Old world distribution channels are limited by the number of venues, whether those are radio stations, TV channels, concert halls, or feet of shelf space on record stores. In the old world, artists would be shut out if radio stations wouldn't play them or if Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble wouldn't put them on the shelves. Consolidation in the old world meant even fewer venues, and fewer venues meant less variety.
iTunes sells every song it can get a license to sell. There's no limit to its shelf space, or how many channels it has. New artists aren't going to be shut out of iTunes because there isn't enough room.
The only risk for consumers is that the lack of competition will drive up prices. Luckily, there are still Amazon and other online stores competing with iTunes. And really, since the RIAA cartel restricts the prices for iTunes and everyone else, that's not really an issue anyway.
Okay, so some commercial players have jumped on the bandwagon (and I doubt mplayer's codecs are technically legal), but MP3 is still more compatible and more common. How about car stereos--do CDs full of AAC files work as well as CDs full of MP3s?
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Embrace
Extend
Extinguish
This gets +5 insightful?
EEE does not mean "buy out your competition." EEE means "subvert and discredit your competition, forcing them out of business."
An EEE strategy in this case would be:
1. Embrace: Announce that iTunes will become a Lala client, with full support for all Lala features
2. Extend: Offer new, proprietary features through iTunes that are not available through the regular Lala website, fostering dependence on iTunes as a Lala client
3. Extinguish: Remove support for Lala from iTunes, leaving all Lala users dependent on iTunes
In an EEE strategy, Lala would not have gotten a dime from Apple. Apple did not EEE Lala, Lala sold out to the man, plain and simple.
If only I could get a refund for my hundreds of web songs :(
Serves you right for paying for a license to listen to music instead of a downloaded file that you keep.
Anyone know of a service that sells downloadable, DRM-free music that you can copy to unlimited computers, burn to CD, back up, and maybe use with iPods?
I think the Amazon music store can do that. I wonder if there are any others....
iTunes is not in and of itself profitable.
You're a fool. They're celebrating billions of iTunes song sales and you're telling me that they're taking a hit on each of them? Is that why The New York Times calls it a "profit machine"? Is that why Billboard estimates they made a half billion in profit from song sales one year? The most conservative estimate I can find puts them closer to a 10% profit margin on song sales which means that their billions in revenues equates to hundreds of millions of dollars.
I tell you what, though. I'm such a nice guy, I'll take the iTunes Media Service off Steve Job's hands and keep supporting only his iPods. I'll start accepting the "loss" and "risk" you seem to associate it with.
There's no way that Lala could have been profitable.
Really? The pricing structure I laid out for you didn't look like it could possibly net some profit?
... or drop $80 million and burn Lala to the ground. I think he made the right choice for his company and the wrong choice for consumers and actual competitive capitalism. Can't blame him but you're a fool if you think he's losing cash on iTMS. I'm not even a businessman and this is painfully obvious to me.
Here, let me help you out with what actually happened. Jobs saw Lala make some innovations like 10 cents to stream a song as much as you like. He got a bunch of consultants to analyze what would happen if iTMS started doing that. And they said that he would still make money but it wouldn't be the drastically high amount he makes because those streamers would opt for that instead of buying the full price song. So he had a choice. Take some undetermined loss by meeting Lala's functionality and compete with them
My work here is dung.
Yeah, ok. I'll see your cross-platform MP3 virus with an attack vector that only works when copying files from a Windows machine, and raise you an FSM, two pink unicorns, and a hot chick married to an old man for love.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
If the price goes from $.10 to $.99, isn't that 8.9x more, and not 9.9x more as stated?
Of course, I had to google that. Here's the full interview:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,591943,00.html
An extraordinarily interesting interview, to say the least. Well worth a full read.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
If you were comparing one compressed audio format to another, that'd be fair. Your friend with the 8-track isn't using a ubiquitous format anymore, either. The use of AAC/M4A by Apple is form of vendor lock-in, albeit somewhat softer now that they sell some audio tracks without DRM (thank you, Amazon!).
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Not every day, but it does seem to be increasing every week, or perhaps just every month.
Consider that it may be due to changed circumstances. A few years ago when Apple acted evil, it only affected those who were committed to it...often idealistically committed. These days it is having a much bigger impact on the average user. So it's more significant when they do something evil.
If you ever though that Apple was a good company, you just weren't paying attention. This was safe, as there was a large space to go to when you didn't like something they did. If, however, you invest a lot of money in something, say a collection of LaLa music, and you are suddenly told "That music is going away, but we'll give you the cost of it as credits at our new store, where things cost 10 times as much" (I'm relying on another poster for that figure.), then it's understandable if you are less than enchanted with the company coercing you thusly. These aren't people who CHOSE to use Apple, these are people coerced into using them.
An analogous action happens whenever a company ties you into a long-term service agreement, and then raises the price a lot in the middle of the agreement. This is clearly "Bait and Switch", but the usual laws don't usually cover this technique. So the people who get shafted are unhappy with the entity applying the shaft. (N.B.: In some of these deals, the entity applying the shaft had no say in what would happen. Like the way the phone company collects taxes. There are commercial analogues to that measure, which insulate the malefactor from public anger over the results of his misdeeds.)
Apple has deserved bad press ever since the days of the Apple ][. They also generally deserve all the good press they get, and that's been continuing. (If you check, you should see that there are also more stories praising Apple ;than there were in an equivalent period a year or two ago.) But when most of the people affected by Apple's actions were committed to them, bad press wasn't interesting to anyone, and good press was mainly interested to those committed. Now there's a broader base for the stories, and a lot fewer of them are willing to uncritically praise Apple.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No NO NO,
The Steve Job Icon needs to be the man on the big screen from the 1984 video.
With an iPod control interface at the bottom?