Lala -- The Music No Longer Plays ;-(

Lala is a on-line music service that lets you keep you music on-line and on its servers -- in the cloud.

Apple bought Lala on November 5, 2009 for 80 million, and on May 31, 2010 Apple will shut it down.

Apple is shutting it down because Lala does not work on the iPad. Lala uses Adobe Flash 10 to  play music, and Apple has publicly [and loudly] not installed a Flash player for the iPad.

One of the best uses for Lala would be to play songs on the iPad.

Although I could sync my whole library on an iPad -- just like on an iPod, this is complicated though since "our" iPad as actually my wife's so she has her music on it. This make Lala better since I am a squatter when use it.

As a Lala customer who has uploaded 3005 songs to Lala, I am not happy. Here is a case of one strong competitor squashing a smaller competitor that was providing a good product at a good price.

The best thing about Lala was that I could listen to a whole song before buying it -- unlike the 30 second samples on iTunes. The songs cost $0.89.

Lala was not perfect. I wondered why the Lala Music Mover was transferring all my music, but after a few nights of downloading, I had a portable music resource.

Speculation is that Apple is going open an online version of iTunes for streaming music. This is related to a huge data center they are building in North Carolina. 

The sad news is when you log on to Lala now, you see the message that they are not accepting new members, and now there are only 31 days left. Soon the music will No Longer Play.