First-order effects

• If the Lala partnership advances, Facebook users would gain free listening and sharing inside the network, while Lala gains distribution at a scale its own site could never reach — but the reported model mismatch means deal terms, licensing scope, and who controls the player experience all remain unresolved.
• The majors become the immediate gatekeepers: any free-sharing product on Facebook requires label licenses, shifting negotiating leverage squarely onto the labels' side of the table.

Second-order effects

• A Facebook-Lala tie-up would force MySpace Music and Apple to defend their positions — MySpace because Facebook would be attacking its core artist-fan territory, and Apple because a frictionless social listening layer could siphon discovery traffic away from the iTunes store.
• Other startups in the cloud-music space would face a brutal choice: seek similar social-platform distribution deals or risk being commoditized, accelerating consolidation among small music services.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, social graphs replace storefronts as the primary discovery layer for recorded music, pushing platforms toward full licensed-streaming integrations rather than ad-hoc partnerships — a direction Facebook was reportedly still pursuing years later with talks on a Spotify-style streaming service.
• Small music services increasingly end up as acquistion targets or feature suppliers to big platforms, foreshadowing exactly how Lala's story resolved when Apple moved to buy it.