I received an e-mail today from LaLa indicating the service would be discontinued May 31 st. LaLa was bought by Apple last year and everyone expects some sort of iTunes in the cloud service. I assume that true, but what I don't like about the notification is that they are just pulling the plug with no replacement in functionality. Everyone assumes Apple will announce something sometime in June. It is as if Apple has literally killed a competing music service with only a promise of a comparable replacement.
LaLa offered a great service that allowed you to buy web songs for only 10 cents. These songs lived on the cloud and you could stream them through your web browser to listen to them. You can buy the un-DRMed MP3s too for the typical 99 cents and the also offered the physical CD. You could buy a web song or MP3 then upgrade to the next level for just the difference in price. LaLa also sync'ed all of your existing music to their servers so that you could view and stream it anywhere you had a web browser and an Internet connection. (They just recently discontinued uploading your MP3s if they weren't already in their catalog. I assumed there digital rights legal reasons behind this change.)
Lets hope that Apple's iTunes upgrade is spectacular, otherwise this really will be disappointing.. and evil.. Microsoft-style.
Click here to download:
lala-music-service-to-be-discontinued-may-31-osnAIfAwyywyHsjmzzwl.zip (260 KB)
