Apple Inc has acquired digital music service Lala. The move is not all that unexpected as the dominant online music retailer explores new models for selling music. Apple confirmed the purchase on Friday. iTunes is the leading music service worldwide with more than 70 percent of all digital music sales. With more than 11 million songs, the iTunes store is also the most complete download store. However, newer music streaming services such as MySpace Music and Spotify have begun to win over music fans in the last year. The move could suggest that Apple does believ that the whole music model migt shift to a streaming one.
Lala allows users to stream from the Internet any tune in its catalog of more than 8 million songs once for free, and then sells unlimited streams for 10 cents per track and MP3 downloads starting at 79 cents. The company has around 100.000 customers and recently partnered with Google to provide users song samples along with links to purchase the music. Lala has also partnered with Facebook to offer music through the social networking site.
Acquiring Lala means iTunes will probably enforce its very own download store or it might want to develop a browser based iTunes download store as well as we pointed out a while back. It could also mean that Apple might have a better idea how to monetize streams, which would be excellent news for the music industry. It’s less good news for Spotify which needs to get a 2nd life in order to survive.
Both music services iLike and Lala have seen a massive growth since they have been included in Google’s Music Onebox service. Muztec checked the traffic statistics as represented by Alexa and found that both services are now almost both as big with MySpace owned iLike slightly being the biggest (see the detail – iLike being in red with Lala being in blue). However it’s Lala who has seen a massive growth of almost 900% overnight. iLike ‘only’ doubled its traffic since what could be called a very succesful joined venture with Google.
A interesting news tidbit reached us from the colleagues at 
Google is partnering with at least 4 online music services for its Google Music service (in fact nothing more than an enhanced search). There will streaming songs from LaLa.com, song samples from iLike.com, and song purchasing options from Apple’s iTunes and from Amazon MP3. Muztec learned that a 5th partner would also join, namely iMeem. Revenue from the service will be split between the music servics and the record labels as Google views the system more as a way to retain users rather than a direct revenue source.