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."

Comments

You should get a refund

[loufoque]

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'.

Re:Steve jobs as borg

[Anonymous Coward]

No NO NO,
The Steve Job Icon needs to be the man on the big screen from the 1984 video.

Re:You Have No Clue About Lala, Do You?

[eldavojohn]

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?

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 ... 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.