Well that didn’t take long. Just a few weeks after I wrote about Apple acquiring LaLa.com, the site is being closed down. May 31, 2010 will be the last day for the site that has twice gotten me all excited about it and then pushed me away.

I’m the first to admit to being an Apple fangurrl, but really, this annoys me a lot. Rumor abounds that Apple will soon be opening its own streaming network but I can’t see them following LaLa’s business model. I think Apple will expect more of a profit margin than a nice 10 cents for songs that you only listen to online. We already know they charge more than 89 cents for downloads.

I liked LaLa’s model because it worked for people who don’t have a lot of money. No monthly subscription fees, you could listen to an ENTIRE song once before you decided to buy or not, and you could add as little as a buck to your “wallet” if you wanted to buy something. Places that charge monthly, or require reloading in amounts of $10 or $20 are out of many people’s league, believe it or not. I know it’s more than I can frivolously spend.

LaLa users will be given an iTunes store credit in the amount that they had spent on the LaLa site. I spent $5. That’ll get me 5 songs from iTunes as opposed to the 50 wonderful songs I had amassed in my LaLa collection. I discovered a huge number of new things that I’d never listened to on LaLa over the last month or so. I feel kind of sad that my journey of discovery is over for now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Opinions And Essays, View Points. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.