There’s a new music store in town named Lala.com. TechCrunch and many others are calling it a possible game changer or revolution in music sharing/buying. I was pretty skeptical of the concept at first, but after trying it out I’m pretty impressed. It has potential to be a very nice service as a HTPC plugin, too.
HERE’S HOW IT WORKS:
- You sign up and get 50 free songs for streaming
- There are “streaming songs” that you can listen to (most in their entirety) once before buying. You can then pay 10 cents to purchase (or as they say ‘keep’) the right to stream any of these songs for as long as they exist and you maintain your account with them.
- You can purchase for download any of the songs for an additional 79 cents ($0.89 total) – these are DRM-free, MP3s compatible with all MP3 music players. The vast majority of the MP3 files are encoded using variable bit rates (VBR), aiming at an average of 256kbp
- You can also “match the songs” on your computer (all songs regardless of where you got them) to their catalog and always have free access to those songs via streaming.
The streaming and “syncing” feature sounds very familiar to me. You know why? Because it is almost exactly the type of “music locker” service we once knew as MyMp3.com (don’t go there, it’s an adult site now) and mp3tunes.com which still exists but is being sued by the the record labels. So here I guess the labels think it’s okay because they’ve put their restrictions on the streaming rules and they are getting paid royalties. The business model is similar to Rhapsody except it’s pay per tune, instead of pay per month, for music streaming. It’ll appeal to people if they understand it: No subscription fees, only pay for the songs you want to stream. Plus take it with you for 89 cents total. A closer competitor in concept might be GrooveShark – another service I really like.
hey dave, hows it going?
Reminds me of the Slacker Premium service. For $10/mo you can favorite any song in your radio streams (custom and pre-packaged) and it is instantly accessible any time. That’s more money than Lala, but with Slacker you don’t need to be online. Slacker saves any favorited songs to my Slacker mp3 player. In other words, the song is downloaded but captive on my player and my PC.
Love the “match the songs” feature for Lala. Simple. Brilliant.
I’ve been a lala member for years. Originally, they were a used CD trading service – I’ve traded about 50 CDs. For about $1.75 per disc, you can get as many CDs sent to you as you send away to others. I was able to clear out some of the cruft from my collection, and it was nice. However, CD trading slowed way down, and they bought WOXY when they were about to be shut down. Free streaming music was nice, but unsustainable (they didn’t have anything as good as Pandora…) and they’ve now re-positioned themselves a third time. Now, while trading is still performed on a limited basis, they are focused on being a place to buy music for streaming and for DRM-free download.
My main hope is that they release an iPhone / iPod Touch application, similar to the Pandora application, so that I can listen to my purchased (whether through free credits or by $0.10/ea) streaming music on my iPod. Otherwise I’m stuck only listening to it when I’m willing to tether my ears to a computer, which isn’t as often as you’d think.
The “match the songs” feature is a great idea, but may be begging for trouble with the record industry… What is to stop people from “matching” the gigs of music they got from Napster back in the day?