A new report by CNET’s Greg Sandoval yesterday gave an update on Apple and Google’s race to deploy music to the cloud. Basically, according to his sources, Apple isn’t close to doing anything massive in the space. Google, meanwhile, is likely closer but may have a hard time getting traction early on due to iTunes’ dominance. But the most interesting bit is buried a few paragraphs in.
According to… → Read More
AudioBox.fm, the cloud-based music service that lets users upload their music collection and access it anywhere, has added the iPhone/iPod touch to its list of supported devices through a native application.
Previously, iPhone users could only access AudioBox via Mobile Safari, a bit of a kludge since the QuickTime Player plugin effectively takes over the phone’s browser. There’s also existing… → Read More
HP is preparing for a major showdown with Apple. After snapping up the beleaguered Palm for $1.2 billion, Hewlett-Packard has purchased Melodeo, a Lala competitor, for roughly $30 to $35 million, according to a source familiar with the deal.
The acquisition, which was signed this month, may seem inconsequential for a behemoth like HP, but it represents a major shift in strategy for the… → Read More
Lala – where music will stop playing …
In a brief message that was just posted on the Lala.com website, Apple has announced that the service will be shut down on May 31st, 2010. Apple will not be accepting new users, and existing users will be able to log in only until the end of next month.
Does this mean we can start raising our hopes for iTunes in the cloud? → Read More
Lala – where music will stop playing …
In a brief message that was just posted on the Lala.com website, Apple has announced that the service will be shut down on May 31st, 2010. Apple will not be accepting new users, and existing users will be able to log in only until the end of next month.
Does this mean we can start raising our hopes for iTunes in the cloud? → Read More
Buried all the way at the bottom of the Wall Street Journal’s latest piece about the Apple Tablet is a very interesting nugget of information. Apple is apparently gearing up to launch a cloud-based iTunes replacement called iTunes.com as soon as this June, WSJ states citing sources familiar with the matter.
Yesterday, we ran a guest post by Michael Robertson, the former CEO of MP3.com, who laid… → Read More
This is a guest post from Michael Robertson, a 12-year veteran of the digital music business. He is the founder and former CEO of digital music pioneer MP3.com. He is currently the CEO of music locker company MP3tunes. Robertson is also an adviser to Google Voice.
For years there’s been speculation that Apple would supplement their $1/song (now $1.29) iTunes business with a monthly subscription… → Read More
Digital music company eMusic is rumored to be up for sale, according to various reports, but that hasn’t stopped it from signing licensing deals with big music. This morning, eMusic announced that it come to an agreement with Warner Music Group and that it will soon begin selling tracks from WMG’s roster of artists to its U.S. users.
eMusic last year inked a similar deal with Sony Music… → Read More
Of all the things Google has launched this past year, the most useful may be its Music Onebox feature that allows you to easily play popular music from Google Search results. Following its debut in October, I found myself using it left and right for songs I wanted to listen to. One thing I noticed was that while deals were in place with iLike, imeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora, the majority of the… → Read More
Vienna, Austria-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so.
The launch has been a long time coming, considering the fact that the startup has already produced a fully functional web client, and Adobe-AIR powered desktop client and applications for iPhone, Facebook and Boxee since its … → Read More
Online music services have had a bad few weeks. Imeem got bought by MySpace for next to nothing, Lala got bought by Apple for something ranging from a little to not-very-much. Spotify continues to be a no-show in the U.S. But at least one service, Pandora, appears to be doing quite well for itself.
The service has announced that it surpassed 40 million registered users earlier this month. That… → Read More
Sometimes you have to apply the smell test to what your sources are telling you, and the rumors we’re hearing about Apple’s purchase of music service LaLa are definitely smelling a little off. $80 million for LaLa? That isn’t what we’re hearing.
LaLa was purchased for $17 million by Apple, according to our sources with indirect knowledge of the deal. And the company supposedly had $14 million in… → Read More
Earlier today we covered rumors that Apple was in talks to acquire streaming music service Lala. Now New York Times tech reporter Brad Stone has tweeted that it’s a done deal. He writes, “Apple has acquired digital music startup Lala. Now updating our story”. You can find the NYT story here.
This could be bad news for Lala users. It’s unlikely that the innovative deals negotiated by Lala… → Read More
Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is “in talks to acquire online music service Lala, according to two people familiar with the matter.”
The shoe fits. Back when Lala launched I described it as an iTunes in the cloud — something that we believe Apple will inevitably launch. Apple is certainly building a lot of data center capacity for something. We’ve been huge fans of Lala since its launch… → Read More
Last week Google launched the Music Onebox — a special new search result that lets users stream songs in their entirety for free. The feature is being powered through partnerships with MySpace and Lala, who are providing the song streams, with contributions from a host of other partners like Pandora and imeem. Millions of people will doubtless stumble across the new feature on their own as… → Read More
Now that the dust is settling on the newly launched Google Music (if you don’t yet have it in your normal Google search results, you can use it here) that integrates LaLa and iLike/MySpace streaming music, all I can think of is this: What were Facebook and Ticketmaster thinking when they passed up the opportunity to acquire iLike?
MySpace is the big lottery winner here. They bought iLike for $20… → Read More
TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid traveled down to Los Angeles earlier today to cover the launch of Google Music Onebox. In addition to his live notes from the event and the panel, he managed to point his camera at just about everyone involved in the new service: Google Director Product Management Search R.J. Pittman, MySpace Music President Courtney Holt and LaLa founder Bill Nguyen. Jason also… → Read More
Last March I wrote a preview post showing off Lala’s upcoming iPhone app, which gives users the ability to stream their entire music collection from the cloud, without having to worry about syncing their files. At the time Lala wasn’t ready to give a release date for the app, but our impression was that it was due out fairly soon. Obviously that wasn’t the case. But now we’ve gotten our hands… → Read More
I’m here at Capitol Records in Hollywood, California for a special media event where Lala, MySpace, iLike, Google and others are officially announcing the launch of Google’s Music Onebox — a special new kind of Google search result that will let you instantly stream songs directly from Google’s results page. We first broke the news of the feature’s impending launch last week, though none of the… → Read More
Following Google’s announcement of its music product this morning, Facebook is officially enhancing its Gift Shop with a redesign and new categories of gifts and additional gifts for charity, music and sports from developers. The changes will be rolled out to users in the coming weeks
On Facebook’s Gift Shop, you need to purchase credits on the site (via credit card), that cost 10 cents in U.S. → Read More
None of the companies involved will confirm the new Google Music service – we have “no comments” or absolute silence from Google, LaLa, MySpace and iLike. But the new service is all but confirmed. And we have the screenshots showing how the service, which will be announced on October 28, will look to prove it.
Matt Ghering, a product marketing manager at Google, has been one of the people talking… → Read More
blueTunes, a streaming music site that lets you stream your music library from the cloud to any computer, is launching a new desktop app tonight that looks to make the service an even more compelling alternative to other online music sites and possibly even iTunes.
For those who aren’t familiar with the service, blueTunes lets you scan your hard drive for music files and upload them to the site’s… → Read More
Easily my favorite app on the Android platform is Imeem. It’s simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to listen to a huge range of music for free. And now it’s coming to the iPhone, we’ve learned.
The Imeem app has already been submitted for App Store approval and could be released any day, we’re hearing from a reliable source. In terms of what it will offer, you can probably expect it to be… → Read More
How bad are things getting for music streaming startups? We knew that imeem was on the verge of shutting down before getting a last-minute cash infusion from some of its investors, but an SEC filing from Warner Music adds some more details about exactly how dire imeem’s situation is, as well as that of another music startup, Lala.
Warner Music Group, an investor in both imeem and Lala, thinks… → Read More
I’ve been tracking the progress of Vienna, Austria-based music startup tunesBag for a while now. It’s essentially a social music player that can best be compared to the likes of Lala, imeem and Anywhere.fm in the sense that it allows you to upload your entire MP3 collection, stream it from anywhere over the Internet and share it with your friends. It’s completely free and claims to be perfectly… → Read More
Tonight music-streaming service Lala will be rolling out a number of improvements to its homepage and integrated music player. While the site has had a clean feel since its relaunch last October, it has also been a bit spartan – users had to navigate to various links to find their playlists and songs, and while it looked good it wasn’t as functional as it could have been.
The redesign builds… → Read More
Online music may be a treacherous space right now, but there are still a handful of music startups that may be coming close to getting it right. One of our favorites is Lala, a streaming music site that allows users to put their digital music library in the cloud, which can then be accessed from any computer. And soon, they’ll be able to access every song they own from their iPhones too… → Read More
Facebook’s ongoing effort to launch a free streaming music service is stalled, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. The company was close to a deal that would bring free streaming music from three of the four big labels (Universal, Sony, EMI) through the Total Music joint venture. But the deal stalled when the lone holdout, Warner Music, refused to participate.
Through most… → Read More
MOG demo’d the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far.
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today… → Read More
Music streaming service Project Playlist has 40 million users if you believe their home page, or around 10 million if you go by Comscore unique monthly visitors. Either way, it’s a lot. They’ve got a hot new CEO, raised a big round of financing, and finally signed a deal with a big label.
But they’re also in a very vulnerable position right now. Litigation with the other three labels continues… → Read More
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