Lala—the music streaming business Apple purchased in late 2009 over Google—will officially be shut down at the end of this month. Lala was an interesting company in that it allowed users to purchase one of over 7 million songs for $.10. Buyers had unlimited access to purchased songs on the web while an official download to your hard drive would cost the usual $.79 to $.89.

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.