As others have posted or reported today, Apple has purchased the excellent online music platform Lala.  Lala is a streaming music service with an interesting premise: you upload your entire iTunes library to the service and you can stream — for free — any of that content anywhere you can access their website.

It’s robust and works well.  Along with uploading your library, Lala also uploads significant metadata like ratings, play counts, and more.  It’s basically your iTunes library, to go.

They have an iPhone app in the queue, which for some reason (hmm…) has not yet been released.  I fully believe this app would change how a lot of streaming music occurs. Think of it: your entire music library is in the cloud, accessible anywhere you can make a phone call.

Lala is an interesting model.  Sure, you can listen to any song you already own via their system.  If you don’t own a song and want to hear it, you can stream it once for free on the site.  After that, you pay 10 cents and you can stream it all you like via the service (another boon for the iPhone app).

If you’re not satisfied there, you can pay another 99 cents (or $1.29 where applicable) and download a high quality MP3 file of the song.  Oh, and the streaming service is ad-supported and labels and artists are paid on an ad-rev share system.  Basically, they cover the gamut of digital music product types, which is pretty unique in this market.

So, why did Apple buy them?  Gruber, NYT and Lefsetz assert that it’s a talent grab: cherry-picking technology and developers who are doing it right, so Apple can just pick up where Lala left off.  I have to agree, but I’d like to add a couple things to think about.

When I read about this rumor a couple days ago, I started thinking about Apple’s MobileMe service.  MobileMe allows Mac users to sync their mail (with a me.com account), their calendar, contacts, and computer settings across multiple Apple devices.  I have it and love it, works great (now).  You get all that and a 20GB cloud backup disk, all for $99/year.

I’m betting Apple integrates Lala into this suite of services.  Lala’s hard drive uploader and iTunes backup system would be a perfect addition to this existing functionality.  My question would be, what about the streaming?

I’d gladly pay for an Apple streaming music service, but I thought it would take a while before we’d see one.  Perhaps they’ll rollover the streaming service into a new iTunes-like experience; perhaps they won’t. Lala offers playlists, widgets, social networking, plus AmazonMP3-style $3.99 deals.  That part of their business seems too finnicky for Apple to play with.

Critics have said the Lala model is too complicated for your average consumer; people will forget what songs they own, what they’ve paid 10 cents for, and won’t keep up with the content.

Personally I think it’s too hard a sell to get me to pay 10 cents for tracks I can only hear on their site.  Give me an iPhone app or a Mac app and I might be persuaded.  Integrate it fully with iTunes and I’ll give it all my money.