In December of 2009 Apple bought a small startup led by Bill Nguyen named Lala. The company was named after the first words of Nguyen's adopted son. It was also a word play on the solfège note "La". Lala struggled through pivot after pivot in the music industry, buying digital radio stations, a CD swapping business…

Well this was unexpected: Apple has quietly enabled its devices to stream music to iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches from online storage through iDisk. It's the very next-best thing to putting iTunes in the cloud. UPDATED:

CNET's caught wind of some conversations Apple's had with the four majors, specifically that if their cloud-based music service launches in the coming months it'll only be a soft-launch, minus the punch-packing features they really want to enable. Like video.

It's clear that Apple's bound for the cloud, but as a company known for withholding features until they're just right, many questions remain. Boy Genius reports that a massive cloud push, including wireless syncing and streaming media, is coming soon.

You can sum up the most frustrating thing about being an Apple customer in three little words: "Connect to iTunes."

MediaMemo throws more cold water on the idea that Apple shutting down Lala at the end of the month means a streaming iTunes.com is coming anytime soon, though they're talking to labels right now about a "web-based" iTunes.

Reader Aaron Vader has sent us an email announcing that Lala.com will shut down on May 31. If you are a Lala user, your credits will be converted to iTunes credits. Does that mean that streaming iTunes.com would launch soon?

Music services embedding personal info into the songs you buy as sekret DRM isn't new. But it could take on a whole new level of relevance once cloud-based music streaming services from Apple or Amazon or Google finally launch.

Apple isn't going to use LaLa to launch a subscription service, a "variety of insider sources" have told the founder of MP3.com. It's exactly what we speculated: Storing your iTunes library in the cloud and access it from anywhere.

Apple's always been a particular kind of company, obsessed with experiences, controlling them, end to end. But those they've always been centered around the traditional desktop. Until Apple bought Lala. Is Apple taking the internet seriously now?

So, reason Apple paid $85 million for Lala is because they were stealing it from Google. Which is like payback, because Google stole Admob from Apple, and oh, lordee is this fight gruesome.

We've been wondering what a Lalaized iTunes would look like, and we weren't too far off: The WSJ says iTunes is evolving into a web-centric model, making the biggest music store in the world that much more powerful.

It still seems strange, on the face of it. iTunes is the ginormousest force in digital music, beaming out billions of bits a day. Apple paid $80 million (maybe) for Lala, a streaming site you've never heard of. Why?

In today's forgotten corner of Gizmodo that is Remainders, we've got OK Go's new tech-courting music video, ever more info on the Apple-Lala acquisition, a super (Mario) cross-stitch project, and Ellen Degeneres's gadgety Christmas giveaway. Buckle up, you guys.

The New York Times is reporting that Apple's agreed to buy the music streaming service LaLa, according to "a person with knowledge of the deal." Apple's now in the streaming music business.

Apple is close to acquiring digital-music service Lala, according to two sources with knowledge of the discussions.