First Look: Lala's iPhone App Will Stream Your Music Library From The Cloud
Online music may be a treacherous space right now, but there are still a handful of music startups that may be coming close to getting it right. One of our favorites is Lala, a streaming music site that allows users …
Context & Ripple Effects
Lala has been remaking itself for two years. Back in 2007 the Wall Street Journal described its model as free listening with a fee to carry songs — an ownership-flavored approach — while by December 2008 it was reportedly positioning itself to lead a bid for a Facebook music service despite open questions about whether social-network music deals could work.
The iPhone app reported here completes that pivot: instead of selling downloads to keep, Lala now streams a user's existing library from the cloud onto Apple's handset. TechCrunch frames online music as 'treacherous' territory at this moment, which makes a startup betting on cloud delivery rather than file ownership a live test of whether the licensing-and-streaming math can hold up.
First-order effects
- iPhone owners using Lala get their music collections without syncing files through iTunes, putting a third-party cloud service directly on Apple's most controlled distribution surface.
- Lala shifts its own cost structure toward hosting and bandwidth, since every play now pulls from its servers rather than a user's local copy.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces an app whose core value proposition — library in the cloud, not on the device — sits uneasily with the sync-centric iTunes model that anchors the iPhone, forcing a question of how long such apps stay welcome.
- Always-on streaming from a pocket device adds sustained network load; the earlier confirmed case of iPhone traffic knocking out dozens of Wi-Fi access points at Duke University in 2007 previews what campus and carrier networks absorb as libraries move off-device.
Third-order effects
- If cloud-streamed libraries prove viable under licensing terms labels will accept, the default shape of digital music shifts from files people store to catalogs hosted elsewhere — a structural change in who bears storage costs and who controls playback.
- Startups like Lala become acquisition targets or partners for larger players needing cloud-music capability, since building licensed streaming infrastructure in-house is slower than buying it.
The trend: Personal music libraries are migrating from locally stored files to cloud-hosted streaming, with independent startups like Lala running the experiment ahead of the incumbent download economy.