Hearing about Apple’s interest in acquiring Lala, I have these thoughts as to why Lala is a great value to Apple.
1. The 10 cents per song music streaming price
I’ve previously posted a blog post on Lala titled ‘10 cents a song is pretty tempting‘ . Maybe Steve Jobs read my blog post. How many times do customers not follow through with an iTune purchase because “they like the song, but maybe not enough to buy it … just yet”. Paying 10 cents a song to essentially bookmark the song for internet streaming rights to play back, in my mind, is the unique thing Lala offers that is a very nice feature…. and one that may lead to a further sale. Note; this #1 reason influences all the other reasons, in my mind.
2. User music interest data mining – adding the 10 cent streaming purchases to purchases gives two levels of indication of user interest. Plus the conversions of 10 cent to full mp3 purchase is yet another data point to measure.
3. Playlists – User created playlists can feed recommendation engines. What if this were channeled into crowd-sourced online radio station programming ?
4. Home Theater play ? – I don’t hear that Apple TV has been a huge success. What if your music library (including streaming only purchases) were added to an Apple home theater system offering? That may be more attractive to consumers. Roku just added Pandora to their Roku box (which I purchased awhile back to stream Netflix movies … for free … since I have a Netflix account).
5. Response to Google – Google’s music search addition announce October 28 2009 brings up Lala as one of several matches to searches for music at the top of the search page. Frankly, I was expecting to hear something from Facebook as a response. Apple’s response is pretty impressive considering their dominance in the digital music already with iTunes. And with the launch of Vevo.com (powered by Youtube), maybe Apple’s Lala acquisition is a counter attack in the making.
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