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So, Apple acquires music streaming service lala.com in late 2009 for $80 million and shuts it down unceremoniously.

Less than 5 years later pays $3 billion for Beats electronics, largely for their music streaming service.

Lala became iTunes Radio AFAIK.

Actually, FWIW I think lala's technology (matching songs based on the audio waveform instead of the file's metadata) was used to underpin iTunes Match. It is the component where you match your local library to Apple's library in the cloud, and then only upload anything that Apple doesn't already have.

Lala was way more than iTunes radio. It had low priced cloud music purchases (e.g. $0.29 a song), unlimited cloud streaming for MP3's you already owned, free album listens for 1-2 plays, an integrated streaming player for third party sites, and more. It was way ahead of its time and competitors, but it was killed by Apple and used for almost nothing.

Several of those features sound a lot like iTunes Match.

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