Apple has announced it will be shutting down its online music service Lala on May 31.
If you try to join Lala.com as a new users you"ll be presented with a message "Lala is shutting down. The Lala Service will be shut down May 31, 2010. Unfortunately, we are no longer accepting new members." If you"re a member you can continue to use the service until the end of the month. If you have credits at Lala they will automatically become iTunes credits.
Lala was an online music marketplace of sorts. You could download songs or albums, you could upload your own music and create a playlist to share with your friends and you could stream music from the site. Google even included Lala in some of the results so you could stream a song in your search results. On December 4th, 2009 Apple bought Lala for around $80M.
TechCrunch believes that Apple is finally ready to roll out their iTunes in the cloud service but they may delay the launch of their new service until June 7 at the World Wide Developers Conference.