Lala

» see lala.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Lala launched in March 2006 as a peer-to-peer CD trading site. The pitch was that everyone had old CDs they no longer played, and a clever postal swap could redistribute them at low cost. Users put CDs on a wishlist. The service matched buyers and sellers, and a one-dollar fee paid for the postage. By the end of 2006 about half a million CDs had been swapped on the platform. The CD-trading product was charming and limited. Bill Nguyen, the founder, used the user base and the music-industry relationships from that phase to launch a much more ambitious second product.

The Lala that people remember launched in late 2008. You could stream any track in the catalog once for free as a preview. After that you had two paths. Ten cents bought a "web song" giving you unlimited streaming of that track from any browser. Eighty-nine cents bought the standard MP3 download. The pricing was original. Ten cents was below the threshold where users hesitated to click. The math was that a power user might end up with a few hundred web songs for a few tens of dollars and an iTunes-class library that lived in the cloud instead of on a hard drive. This was years before Spotify reached the US.

Apple acquired Lala on December 4 2009. The reported price was somewhere between 17 and 80 million dollars depending on which TechCrunch source you trusted, and Apple never confirmed a number. The shutdown announcement came on April 30 2010 and the service went dark on May 31 2010. Subscribers got iTunes Store credits instead of cash refunds. Lala's engineering team went on to build iTunes Match (launched 2011) and the streaming infrastructure that became part of iCloud and later Apple Music. The Lala product itself was deliberately not released as Apple's offering. The brand and the ten-cent web songs were buried.

i did not use lala. it was a US-only paid service in a turkey that was still on winamp libraries with last.fm scrobbling and very gray-market downloads in 2009. apple's later products did reach turkey: itunes match arrived, and apple music landed in 2015. by that point the lala bones inside those products were invisible to anyone who had not been reading us tech press. lala is one of the small acquisitions that mattered to apple's strategy out of all proportion to its public footprint.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the cd-trading phase ~

The first Lala product is worth remembering on its own. In 2006 a meaningful number of people still owned physical CDs they had bought a decade earlier and no longer listened to. Lala's idea was to be a clearinghouse for that dormant inventory. A user listed CDs they wanted to give away and CDs they wanted to receive. The site matched pairs and printed shipping labels. The fee was a flat one dollar per swap. About half a million CDs moved this way in the first nine months. The model could not scale into a streaming-era business but it built the licensing relationships and the listening data that made the second product viable.

~ the ten-cent web song ~

The single most original idea Lala shipped was the web song. For ten cents you got the right to stream a track an unlimited number of times from any browser, with no ownership and no download. This was halfway between a single-track purchase and a subscription, at a price low enough that the friction of the decision disappeared. A web-song library scaled with how much music you actually listened to. Spotify and other subscription services would later collapse this into a flat monthly fee, but the web-song model is still arguably the cleanest way to price casual listening that has ever shipped at scale.

~ what apple actually bought ~

Apple's interest was the engineering team and the cloud-music patents Lala had built up. Steve Jobs had been looking for a way to break iTunes out of the local-hard-drive model that made syncing music between devices painful. Lala's infrastructure for streaming a user's owned library over the web was exactly the missing piece. The first public output was iTunes Match in 2011, a product that scanned your local library and matched it against Apple's cloud catalog so the songs were streamable from anywhere. The second was the streaming foundation that Apple Music launched on top of in 2015. None of that has Lala branding on it. The only thing the Lala name appears on now is the gravestone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »