Let me start by saying that I don't have a clue how much Apple paid to buy Lala, the Silicon Valley online music startup that was gobbled up last week. We've been interested in the purchase price in part because it may or may not turn out to be a much needed base hit for Ignition Partners, the Bellevue venture firm which has not really had the best of years.

I've contacted Ignition to try to get a better idea on how Lala -- which originally raised $35 million -- did from a financial perspective for the fund. In the meantime, it has been fascinating to watch the drama play out on blogs and newspaper Web sites as journalists attempt to pinpoint the exact purchase price.

Here's how things have played out over the past week. On December 4, Peter Kafka of Media Memo (a blog affiliated with The Wall Street Journal) reported that the Lala acquisiton was nothing more than a "fire sale" and that investors would probably lose their shirts on the deal.

Three days later, Kafka changed course and reported that his original source was wrong, and the deal was more in the neighborhood of $80 million. Many bloggers questioned the high price tag, since it didn't quite mesh with some of the past acquisitions in the online music space. (Including the $20 million that MySpace paid for Seattle-based iLike).

One of the bloggers who found conflicting information was Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, who on December 7 reported that Lala was purchased for $17 million. Wrote Arrington:

LaLa was purchased for $17 million by Apple, according to our sources with indirect knowledge of the deal. And the company supposedly had $14 million in cash in the bank, meaning the actual purchase price was really $3 million.

Now, today, comes yet another report from The Wall Street Journal based on unnamed sources which puts the price at $85 million.

So, where does this leave readers? It seems that the deal is somewhere between $3 million and $85 million -- a pretty wide gap. It is a little strange to see purchase prices all over the map, especially from journalists like Arrington and Kafka who are well sourced. Let me know if you have details on where things ended up.

In the meantime, let the speculation continue.