Apple acquires US music streaming service Lala

A report on the US PC World blog says that Lala was waiting for approval on an iPhone app at the time of the acquisition.

The app would allow users of Lala to listen to their music stream via their iPod, reducing the need to use up valuable storage space on the devices with MP3 files.

At the moment, songs bought on Lala cannot be downloaded on to a computer hard drive or an MP3 player. Users can hear a song for free the first time they listen to it, but must subsequently pay 10 cents and the song is added to a personal playlist that they access via the site.

The deal has led to speculation Apple could be looking at developing some kind of web-based music streaming service.

The deal has been confirmed by Apple, but the company is not saying what plans it has for Lala, nor have the terms been disclosed.

Alan Hely, senior director of corporate communications at Apple Europe, said: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans."

Lala was one of the companies to do a deal recently with Google that sees it providing music-related search results. The results, as with Lala's service, are only available in the US.

This article was first published on brandrepublic.com