Hopes for Apple’s purchase of Lala

When I heard of this acquisition I was really excited.  Lala has become my go to site for previewing new albums in their entirety, and while I haven’t really used the purchasing to stream option much, it has been very convenient for my staple albums.  While its obvious that Apple likely wants to leverage the streaming capability I see three things that could come out of this purchase.

1. Full album previews

While 30 seconds of a song can give you a quick taste of what your purchasing, for the listener that still prefers the album to the track, being able to preview the album in its entirety is an important step in deciding whether to purchase.  Lala should give iTunes the ability to allow the potential buyer to listen to the whole album and make a more informed decision.  If nothing else, this might bring in a few more record store addicts that you normally see with headphones on in the new releases section for the good part of a weekend afternoon.

2. Stream your iTunes library anywhere

As consumers get more used to mobile/smart phones replacing things like watches, radios, and cd players people demand to have things they owned accessible anywhere they are.  For the longest time storage has made or broke portable audio players but recently you can stream content from pandora.com and last.fm to a variety of phones.  Who wouldn’t want to be able to have essentially their own customized radio station, where you create a playlist in iTunes of your music, and can access it through a mobile app and stream anywhere you have cell or 802.11 coverage?  You not only get access to your purchased content essentially anywhere, but you alleviate the requirement of having a hefty amount of storage on the mobile devices.

3. This helps move iTunes into a perfect monthly subscription position

Rhapsody has a solid business model and its customers love its service for the low monthly fee and unrestricted selection.  Imagine if you $15 a month or so, you could not only stream your own purchased content, but had unlimited access to stream the entirety of the iTunes library to your hearts content.  It might seem like a weird move for Apple, but its a move that has worked at a more limited capacity for a number of their competitors in a very profitable way.  Why wouldn’t Apple try to own this market too, and potentially knock out a few competitors in the process?

So those are my thoughts on this acquisition.  If Apple plays its cards right it could essentially end up owning the entire audio market with this one simple acquisition.