Apple has agreed to purchase the innovative, streaming music service LaLa, according to multiple reports (updated). LaLa fills a big hole in Apple’s digital music strategy and could bring streaming down music from the cloud into iTunes-ready devices everywhere.
Integrating Lala’s ad-free music service — which stores music collections online and sells streaming songs at a deep discount — would mark the first major step forward for iTunes since its music download store launched in 2003.
Lala recently announced a deal to play free songs on Google, but Apple is reportedly particularly interested in the engineers who built Lala’s “payment and fulfillment system[, which] could save Apple millions of dollars a year,” according to a CNET source. Lala sells music fans pre-paid chunks of music credits, rather than individual songs — an approach could help iTunes cut down on its credit card transaction costs and sell songs as streams and as downloads.
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