A lot of people seem quite certain that Apple’s small-time purchase of a little Internet streaming company called Lala is going to fundamentally change the entire way Apple presents content to the user.
The latest to join the fray is the Wall Street Journal, which proposes that Apple will stop selling downloaded music altogether and instead just serve up tunes that you purchase over the web. So no need to carry your entire collection on the internal storage of your iPod touch. Just hook up to the web and stream any song you’ve bought the rights to.
That sounds great. Until you drive into a parking garage. Or to the beach. Or anywhere of a million places that doesn’t have an Internet connection. Do these people ever leave their offices?
The most important feature of any iPod is the ability to get non-stop music on the go, any time, anywhere. One of the best features of the iPhone, even, is that the iPod portion plays without ever skipping a beat, no matter which other applications you jump into or what happens to your internet connection. That lack of even the slightest interruption or stutter is essential to the experience.
What would people do on an airplane, with no stored music on their iPods? Pay for Wifi on the plane, just to listen to a few songs?
Time and time again, Apple’s research has shown that most people’s entire music collection fits comfortably on an 8GB iPod, let alone the 64GB that is available. People fill their iPods and iPhones with video and apps from the App Store, not music. Giving them the option to stream a couple of gigabytes of music isn’t going to help much.
Research has also shown that most songs on people’s iPods come from other sources, either stolen downloads or ripped CDs. A streaming service would do nothing for those songs, either.
Why would Apple, then, want to ditch what has worked so perfectly for years, only to substitute it with something as flaky as wireless Internet?
And why does every little purchase have to be a game-changing experience for Apple? Maybe Lala had some good technology Apple wanted to use to “augment” the iTunes experience. Maybe enough of Lala’s engineers were super-geniuses that it was cheaper to buy the company than just lure away its people with higher salaries. Maybe they just didn’t want Google or Microsoft to buy the company first. Who knows?
How about if Apple started by allowing you to download any song you’ve purchased more than once, so that if you accidentally delete a song or lose a hard drive to a crash, you can recover your purchased files easily. Audible has allowed this for years.
How about if Apple created some sort of Pandora-type service, which leveraged the Genius algorithms it already has plus Lala’s technology to create streamable playlists of recommended songs that you can listen to with the option to purchase and download with a simple click or tap? It would only work when you had a connection, so it wouldn’t be a substitute for your main library of songs, but as an added service, that might be cool.
We still don’t know the exact details of Apple’s purchase of PA Semiconductor several years ago. Chances are, we won’t know exactly what the Lala purchase was all about for a while, either. I won’t be holding my breath for a 0GB iPod Touch, though.
