Apples and Onions

Last December, when Apple bought Lala, I, like the rest of the nation, assumed that they would be using the technology as the basis for a new version of iTunes. Well, six months has come and gone without a further announcement of what, if anything, Apple intends to use it for. I’ve been pretty much come to the conclusion that Apple purchased Lala simply to shut it down, and incidentally (if at all) fold their tech into iTunes. It’s a frustrating situation, although it makes sense from Apple’s point of view – Lala had entirely supplanted my use of iTunes or even my iPod at work. Apple wants to be able to sell mp3s for a dollar a pop – they don’t want someone coming along and selling streaming songs for ten cents a piece, or allowing people to upload their CDs straight to a cloud-based web player.

What frustrates me about the situation is that we have often been promised a lot of things from the future, only to have it underwhelmingly underdeliver in the expected areas – even if it does deliver in unexpected ways. The ability to access your entire music collection, wherever you can find an internet connection, is what the future should be. It irritates me greatly that we’re going to lose that ability because the content distributors are frightened of the implications of this new technology. Flying cars and pills and silver uniforms are all practically impossible. But Lala already exists! And now, of course, it’s gone.