Apple purchases music streaming service Lala

Lala, a cloud based music streaming service, was recently purchased by Apple for a rumored $80 million. While the sale itself was confirmed, the price wasn’t.

Apple’s acquisition of Lala is interesting no matter from what angle you look at it. With a large library of music freely available to stream as well as some content for purchase, Lala’s technology could certainly offer some interesting new updates to iTunes. Going by what Lala currently does, there is almost no doubt that this confirms Apple is planning to integrate some sort of music streaming into iTunes in the future. Who knows, maybe it will be like Pandora or Last.fm, too. No matter what, it should be killer.

While Apple doesn’t usually comment on their purchases of companies and Lala didn’t have anyone around to comment, David Goldberg of SurveyMonkey has asked the best question; “Why should people have to download music?” And he’s right. With the web moving to more and more cloud based computing, it only makes sense that music would be part of this. While it still has obvious flaws, this would be a nice step in that direction. I’m sure we’ll see more about this via iTunes updates sometime in the future, and I’m excited.

Read [The New York Times] and [MacRumors]