As we’ve all heard, Apple bought out Lala.com as a last minute decision yesterday night. Well, users of both Lala and Apple’s iTunes Store couldn’t help but wonder what Apple would do with it. Apple doesn’t purchase small companies as often as their competitors do, which makes this a pretty big deal. When Apple purchases something like this and tries to keep it under wraps, we know their planning something big.

Yesterday, after the purchase, Apple spokesman Steve Dowling released a short statement saying,

Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans

Obviously, Apple is trying to break away from their iTunes “lockdown”, perhaps using Lala as the web browser part of music downloading that they never had. See, without Apple’s iTunes, customers have no access to the music Apple puts out, therefore preventing their customer base from growing even bigger. Currently, Lala has 100,000 subscribers and makes about $10 million in quarterly revenues. Lala.com, previous to Apple’s acquisition was a private employee owned start-up which began as an invite-only BETA on March, 6, 2006 and became public later that year. If Apple puts the design and feature aspects of iTunes into Lala, then maybe they could drag in more quarterly revenue from music sales. We’ll have to wait and see how it turns out. Hopefully, Apple does extend their music sales into a web based streaming service.