Apple Kills Lala Music Service
"Apple closed down the cloud-based Lala music service Friday for reasons unknown, after acquiring it in December. Lala members can still access their online collections, but only until May 31, when Apple will take the service offline completely.
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The second option, which seems incredibly likely, is that Apple plans to launch a cloud-based music service based on Lala’s technology at some point after May 31.
The key: Lala’s song-identification-and-upload technologies (also discontinued as of today) allowed users to mirror their local music — including an iTunes library — onto cloud-based Lala accounts.
By purchasing Lala, Apple acquired technology that would enable it to bounce everyone’s iTunes libraries to online servers, so iTunes users would be able to access their collections from a variety of Apple’s devices: laptops, desktops, Apple TV set-top boxes, iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches.
As of today, Apple doesn’t let you transfer songs from iTunes to your iPhone OS device without one of its proprietary USB cables. Once it launches a cloud-based music service, those cables (or a Wi-Fi or 3G connection) would only be necessary for caching purposes, because all these devices would access the same web-based music collection.
While Apple’s hardware has embraced the cloud since .mac (now Mobile Me), its iTunes software lags far behind. Today’s news, while unfortunate for Lala users, represents good news for iTunes users, because it’s a sign that iTunes too could be headed for the cloud, obviating their need to manage music collections manually between multiple devices."
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