In case you haven’t heard yet, Lala.com is being shut down on May 31. Last December Apple purchased the website and gave no indications what their plans were for the site. Many users, such as myself, hoped the acquisition would allow the site to expand its library and gain additional access to music by leveraging Apple’s pull within the industry. Unfortunately it appears the exact opposite is true. Apple is killing the superior music product to reduce competition to iTunes.
Why must companies continue to do business this way? Lala.com is 1000x better than iTunes, so instead of making their product better, Apple simply buys and shuts down the competition. What a sad existence. This is Microsoft kind of crap Apple’s pulling. Come on Apple, you’re better than this!
Face it, iTunes sucks. It’s bloated, a memory hog, and slow. Additionally the 30 second clips on the music store simply aren’t enough to test drive an album prior to purchase. This has my biggest call to piracy. I remember going to a record store and being able to listen to full albums prior to purchasing them. Nowadays we’re “treated” to 30 second clips from random points of a song and told to make our purchasing decisions based on that. Digital music has sucked all the fun out of purchasing music. Then what little glimmers of hope we do receive, such as Lala.com, are killed off and we’re told we should be content with less.
Good job Apple, you’ve officially become everything I hate.
11:59 pm
While I agree that iTunes has become bloated, I disagree that it sucks as much as you say it does. First, the 30-second clips isn’t Apple’s doing – it’s the RIAA. Second, consider how mobile Apple has become. I don’t think they had a choice but to make iTunes bloated. The only alternative would be to have an application for listening to music, one for syncing an iPod, one for syncing an iPhone, one for syncing an iPad, one for radio streaming, etc. There isn’t much of an alternative. Also, and while I’m all for pirating, would a clip longer than 30 seconds really help you buy music? When you pirate the music, is that long enough for you to find if you enjoy the album where you’ll then go purchase it?
I’d also like to point out that your accusations of shutting down Lala.com to kill the competition is all based on assumptions. Sure, that might be the reason, but the reason could just as equally be something else. They may have purchased it for the technology so they can eventually launch a service similar to Lala – but better. Who knows? Only time will tell.