May 2010

Apple is shutting down its newly bought Lala online music service amid speculation it is creating a way for iTunes customers to listen to songs stored on distant computers.

The move comes just weeks before an annual conference for developers in San Francisco on June 7 at which the secretive company tends to announce big news. Last year, it used the conference to unveil the latest version of its popular iPhone, the 3GS.

With Apple continuing to build a $1 billion data centre in Maiden, North Carolina, that rivals the largest such facilities in the world, some executives in the online music industry believe that Apple is poised to announce an internet-powered version of iTunes that would do away with the need to download songs.

Such a move would pit Apple, the largest online music retailer, against smaller companies that offer ways to deliver music to mobile devices using "cloud computing," a remote-storage system that potentially challenges iTunes and its reliance on downloads and personal storage space.

"Whatever they bought Lala for, it is likely to be integrated into iTunes," said Michael Gartenberg, a partner at technology consulting firm Altimeter Group. "It's no surprise they're shutting this down."

But one factor against a big announcement is that Apple has not approached music executives about its plans since a few months ago, and new licences that would be required have not been set up, according to two people at different major recording companies with knowledge of the discussions.

Customers of iTunes currently pay up to $1.29 per song. Because it takes several minutes to download songs to a phone over mobile networks, most users download songs to their computers before transferring them to their phones with a physical cord.

A cloud system would let users access the songs right away. And because storage space wouldn't be an issue, a user could listen to a wider variety of music on the go.

Several months before Apple bought Lala in December, Lala co-founder Bill Nguyen demonstrated a working, but unapproved iPhone application that streamed songs instantly to the phone to house them in a digital locker on a distant server.

Nguyen called the technology "the end of the MP3," the dominant format for song downloads. After Apple bought Lala, that iPhone application was never launched.



http://www.google.com/hos...N7hF-CWqrA

Yeah I saw the message that Lala was gonna be suspended indefinitely, I figure it was because of some shit like this. What a shame.
[Edited 5/4/10 11:15am]

Apple needs to just focus on the gliche's in the Ipod Touch that 2 years later have NOT been addressed despite complaints, also fix it so customers can buy shit from other countries, shit, stop making Laptops that fit in your pocket, and fix this major issue first