Then you'll be paying to hear your favorite songs over and over again for the rest of your life -- instead of paying just once.
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Apple Acquires Streaming Music Service Lala Media
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Then you'll be paying to hear your favorite songs over and over again for the rest of your life -- instead of paying just once.
Several times I ended up re-purchasing the same songs just because of a new/better/or-just-more-convenient format--vinyl, tape, CD, SACD--and media storage, hard drives and flash memory have a cost to. Other times I ended up listening only few times to a song, or to totally skip some. So, yes I'm looking forward to a pay-per-listen model. I'm confident that it will cost me less money.
Not to back up the claim that they will be streaming, but you are aware they just dropped a billion dollars on a new data center right?
I think it would be naive to believe that the corporate interests behind a pay-per-listen model won't have ways to get just as much money out of consumers in the long run as they would by selling the music in other formats. On the other hand now that I have my favorite music in digital format I'm relatively certain that I will never pay for it again ever. I will probably at some point buy other devices on which to play it, but I expect that would be true of a pay-per-listen model also.
The Apple TV hasn't been a runaway hit but it is certainly one the most successful dedicated media players that has yet been produced so I wouldn't call it a failure by any means.
I agree. In "average" the music industry will get as much money out of consumers, or even more. Conversely, on the individual level the mileage will vary. Let me give an example: Assuming to pay 1¢ to listen to a song, and to listen to 120 songs a day (or 120 repetitions of the same song), then the daily total is $1.20. That is $36 a month. If someone purchasing habit exceed that amount, than the pay-per-listen is convenient.
Its about time. Pandora is a great little application, i have been using this app more than the genius part of iTunes. I hope they try to incorporate this in with Genius or maybe add it to iTunes Radio somehow.
my 2 cents.
my 2 cents.
I was impressed before but now I'm blown away. It took a couple of hours but I downloaded the LaLa Music Mover and it found 2,781 of my 3812 song iTunes Library already available on LaLa and thus also available immediately on the cloud with my associated iTunes playlists etc. and then started "transcoding" another ~774 songs and uploading them to their server. That's estimated to take ~ 14 Hr.s but I can already access and use all the ones it matched. And whenever I restart the music mover program it resumes "transcoding" and uploading. So far the sound quality of what I have tried is very impressive and the interfaces are very slick. This already feels allot like "where the puck will be." No wonder Apple grabbed them!
Been a LaLa user myself for about a year now. I was wondering when Apple would approve a LaLa iPhone app. Hopefully this will be soon. I am worried that Apple won't be able to renew LaLa's music industry deals. Apparently the deals negotiated by LaLa are not transferable to any acquirer.
Cesar
I've noticed that there is a prevailing assumption here that the Cloud will be completely unreliable, that there's a high probability of it "going down" often, and that your data will always be at risk of catastrophic loss.
Why such an assumption? We've only just begun to experience some of this "Cloud" paradigm. Is it not logical to assume that in time, it will probably be far more reliable and consistent than even the local storage you'll access on a regular basis?
No matter what happens to your computer (or "device", as this is now a catch-all term), phone, local storage, hard drives, etc., your data will be available in a simple, central location independent of the condition of your devices. And with expected improvements in the Cloud infrastructure, it will ALWAYS be available to you, accessible from virtually any device, anywhere in the world. iDisk is already halfway there, for example, as are other solutions.
Why such an assumption? We've only just begun to experience some of this "Cloud" paradigm. Is it not logical to assume that in time, it will probably be far more reliable and consistent than even the local storage you'll access on a regular basis?
No matter what happens to your computer (or "device", as this is now a catch-all term), phone, local storage, hard drives, etc., your data will be available in a simple, central location independent of the condition of your devices. And with expected improvements in the Cloud infrastructure, it will ALWAYS be available to you, accessible from virtually any device, anywhere in the world. iDisk is already halfway there, for example, as are other solutions.
Well, since according to most accounts LaLa has never been able to make any money something was bound to change eventually. I mean a small startup like LaLa can't continue to lose money and stay in business.
Not true, unfortunately. At least not in the near term. As it stands now, some business out there will be responsible for managing your (and my) data. If that business goes away, so could the data stored in the cloud.
It's not a matter of reliability vs. unreliability. Certainly redundancies will exist that protect the information against catastrophic loss -- of course, there is no guarantee that the redundancies will be foolproof, or that a cyber attack wouldn't circumvent them altogether.
There's no way to be absolutely sure.
But even if your portion of the cloud is never attacked and there is never a hardware malfunction that results in catastrophic failure ...
... there's always the possibility that whomever you're paying to store your data goes out of business.
What guarantees would you have that you would get your data back? What company would make that guarantee?
I don't think any company would. Liability would be astronomical. Just think of the lawsuits if data was lost.
The cloud will be great for running software that I don't want cluttering my hard drive. Instead, I'll clutter my hard drive (and my local backup systems) with all the data I consider most important -- my own stuff. If I were to count movies along with music, as it stands now I have around a terabyte or so.
I'm glad external hard drives are getting so inexpensive! And storage technology is always progressing. External hard drives will be so antiquated in the blink of an eye.
Seeing as you have no idea what they'll do with this service (if anything), perhaps you should stop freaking out a bit.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10410206-261.html
The New York Times reported that Apple was approached by Lala after the company concluded that reaching profitability was unlikely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/technology/companies/05apple.html?_r=3
One person with knowledge of the deal, but who was not authorized to discuss it, said that the negotiations originated when Lala executives concluded that their prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim and initiated discussions with Eddy Cue, Apples vice president in charge of iTunes.
This person said Apple would primarily be buying Lalas engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services.
Isn't that mostly due to the current business models, we are still in start up stage on the tech and it's really a race to stake claims. We are already seeing projects that move the other way. Their business model is to rationalize the infrastructure so they can service their users for any need.
How long will it be till we see your local device and storage be treated as part of the cloud not just a bucket that collects the rain that falls?
Soon enough someone will build a small lightweight cloud server that you'll be happy to have sandboxed on your devices. Then the business model moves to one that offer syncing services between all the clouds you have rights over. Shared or otherwise they can start to offer interesting things across small connection that are trickle feed updates 24/7 to and from your local cloud with more important updates getting priority. You won't need to worry about if or how your connected as 90% of the internet/cloud that matters to you will be with you anyway.
Your information will always be in one form in your hands, and maybe at your house, but also redundantly at your mums houses or the houses of anyone you have shared with. Well yes in the hands of the orginating service.
To me it's the snycing/backup posiblilities of Lala's technologies that Apple wants to get their hands on, more than the service itself.
Still the service would be good too but i can't see them getting rightholders to agree in this neck of the woods for many many years to come.
Seeing as you have no idea what they'll do with this service (if anything), perhaps you should stop freaking out a bit.
It seems quite clear that Apple will be dissolving the service, likely on December 31. There are many reasons for this. First, purportedly, none of the deals with the labels are transferrable. Second, for all of Apple's recent acquisitions, it has dissolved both the brand and the company (i.e. P.A. Semi, Fingerworks, etc.)
I expect existing LaLa users to get full or partial iTunes credit for songs already purchased and a new iTunes/MobileMe service to launch next year that incorporates LaLa Music Mover functionality, with listening available in iTunes, and on the iPhone, iPod Touch and at iTunes.com. More uncertain, but I also expect the 10 cent streaming option to dissolve. iTunes pricing and downloads will remain the same, the only difference will be the Music Mover technology from LaLa.
Personal data storage in the cloud is different from music storage in the cloud. I would certainly be concerned about keeping my college thesis in the cloud, but I am confident that lala can keep track of the database of music, and replace any lost songs from back-ups or copies that the music companies own.
Acquisitions are also much, much simpler when the target is a private company. After IPO, when there are publicly traded stocks, the SEC is much more involved in the process.