Apple has agreed to purchase Lala, a four year old start-up based in Palo Alto. Lala, unlike Apple iTunes, lets users play the music they own from the Web, or as it is known “from the cloud.”  A source states that Apple would primarily be buying Lala’s engineers and their experience with cloud-based music services.

Lala began as a CD–swapping service and has progressed to its current model - customers purchase or download a song for 79 and 89 cents and pay 10 cents for the rights to stream that song in an unlimited number of times from the Web.

If Apple introduces its own cloud-based streaming music service, it would allow customers to forgo downloading music they purchase as well as the extra work to synchronize their music collection between their computers and mobile devices.