Lala Media, Inc., founded in 2006 by Bill Nguyen and a small team of idealists in Palo Alto, California, died on the thirty-first of May 2010, having been purchased by Apple Inc. the previous December for a reported sum of seventeen million dollars. It was thirty-seven months in operation. In its brief life it had achieved what few music services managed: genuine affection. For ten cents, a listener could own a song in the cloud forever. For nothing, they could stream any album once. The model was elegant, the catalogue vast, and the community around it was the kind that writes letters when something dies.

Apple acquired Lala not to continue it but to consume it — its engineers folded quietly into Cupertino, their work eventually surfacing in iTunes Match and, later, Apple Music. The library each user had assembled with such care was made inaccessible without refund of meaningful substance. No successor honoured the ten-cent promise. Lala is survived by services larger, colder, and less loved.