Goodbye lala, Hello iTunes in the Cloud?

I woke up this morning to a very upsetting email that my favorite music service in the cloud, lala, is closing its doors on May 31st.  As a member since the tail end of 2008 and an avid user of the service, I of course wish it weren’t so; but since Apple bought it earlier this year, it does raise some interesting questions.

First, let me say that there isn’t really another service like lala out there. You can try then buy songs, upload your library, and much more; I did a write up back in November covering the bases. When Apple announced their acquisition of it, I was pretty excited to see what they had in-store for it. Nothing, I guess.

It’s not like Apple to ignore current trends however, especially with the release of the iPad which is a seemingly exclusive travel/web device. So why would they kill a cloud app when that’s what everyone wants? Well, as Boy Genius Report points out, WWDC (Apple’s annual developer’s conference) kicks off a week after lala plays it’s swan song. I suspect that they will have some announcement there regarding iTunes and the cloud.

My thoughts for why they bought lala in the first place shifted from making a kick-ass web-based music service even better to snatching up the developers to make their own while simultaneously  killing the biggest would-be competitor.  I was kind of mad at this at first (plus, it proves they are more like Microsoft than fanboys would like to acknowledge), but if it means better integration between some web interface and the iTunes desktop application, I really shouldn’t complain.