Understanding why Apple bought LALA.com

December 31, 2009

I generally don’t read all the Apple rumor prognostications, so you may file this under the “incredibly obvious/already stated” file if you like.

Last night I was in a Frank Sinatra mood. So I played Sinatra on my AppleTV whilst enjoying family game night. After the kids went to bed, Frank sang “One for My Baby” and I wanted to share my favorite version (Sinatra at the Sands) on Facebook. I searched on Google on found the version on LALA.com. I had heard about lala a while back but hadn’t explored it at all.

I decided to try it out. Lala.com scans your hard drive (or the specific folders you choose) for music you own. It then matches those songs to songs it has licenses to online. This process can take a while depending on your library. I have a mid-sized library, about 4,000 songs, and it took about 10 hours. When it was done, I logged back into lala.com and lo and behold it had essentially recreated my itunes online, playlists included. Now it doesn’t have all the songs I had, it ended up about 65% of the songs. I’m sure that aspect will take care of itself over time.

Now if Apple actually launches a Tablet device, it may not have enough hard drive space to house all of my media. Further, with all of ipods/iphones/computers my family of five has, I don’t want every device to have to house all the songs we own. But if my songs are housed on lala, or whatever Apple rebrands this as, and if the Tablet has either wifi or better yet, a Kindle-like built in EVDO, I can access my playlists wherever I want, on my tablet.

With the amount of music, TV, movies combined with the number of devices people own, the idea of having a storage online versus a ‘home server’ makes a lot of sense. This would make my AppleTV more compelling as well because the size limitations of the device will matter less.

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