Apple buys Lala

One of the last independent streaming services left standing, it was acquisition was fated.  But why Apple?  There seems to be a lot of head scratching going on about that.  If Apple were out to start a streaming service (the article points out) it might have done better to buy a service with better streaming licensing already in place.

The best guess is that they were after the intellectual property, probably the engineering team.  And if I had to guess, it may be related to allowing users to stream their iTunes music from home to a web browser version of the iTunes store anywhere from on the internet.  There are third party apps to do that already (pulpTunes, orb) and it makes sense to get those eyeballs onto the iTunes store instead.

Apple buys music streamer Lala, but what’s it getting?

On balance, the purchase appears to give Apple the chance to bring in engineers that will be useful now, and could be even more so if it chooses to enter streaming or subscription services. But, for the moment, there’s nothing about the purchase that seems to provide the company with any key technologies it was missing in terms of diving into markets. Until another company demonstrates that there’s money to be made (or iPods to be sold) through streaming, there’s no reason to think that a move of this sort is immanent.