Lala is a legal way to get your iTunes library online.
Posted October 21st, 2008 by Oliver CheslerFiled Under: business, music
I have a zillion songs on my studio’s Apple Mac Pro. When I am at home or on the road I can’t listen to those songs. In the past there were services such as My.MP3.com that would let you put all your music in the cloud. However, they never went through the hoola hoops to get past the RIAA and were shut down. Today as I woke up every tech site I read was talking about Lala. Lala, with the blessing from the RIAA lets users have their entire music catalog in cloud. They are also a social network, music store, an iPhone app (yes you can listen to your catalog anywhere), and lastly a free music streaming service ala Last.fm.
“What’s impressive about Lala isn’t just the number of things it does, but how well it does them. I’ve been using it for a while, and it works exceptionally well. The browser-based interface for listening to your music mimics iTunes, and it’s easy to forget it’s Web-based: music starts with little or no delay, and keeps playing even if you browse around Lala or bop over to another browser tab or window.” – technologizer.com
The music you have currently sitting on your hard drive becomes available on Lala and in the cloud two ways. First, if Lala can recognize a song and Lala has it in it’s catalog it will “unlock it” for you without you having to upload your exact file. If on the other hand you have some obscure releases Lala doesn’t know about you will have to go through the upload process.
There is no advertising on the site and they offer two ways to purchase music. You can buy songs for about .79 beating even Amazon MP3 or you can pay .10 and get the permanent streaming right to the song. One thing I have to mention is so far Lala is US only.
So it looks good to me, my only worry is if I spend all my time getting my music on the service and they go out of business my time would be wasted. I also have to consider If Apple rolls their own type of iTunes in the cloud I would want to be with them for the easy integration.
Here’s a few articles that explain out the new Lala:
TechCrunch: Lala May Have Just Built The Next Revolution In Digital Music
Mashable: Lala’s New Business Model May Be Good, But I Don’t Like It
Cnet: New Lala.com may be (too) ahead of its time
Technologizer: Lala’s Spectacular New Music Service
Go take a look and tell me what you think: www.lala.com
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I’ve been using Lala ever since CDM reported on it a few months ago, and I’ve been completely satisfied with it. For me, it’s been a fantastic way to hear new (to me) music, since whenever I read about something interesting, I can go and listen to the whole album free at Lala. Of course they don’t have everything, but they’ve got a lot.
So far, I’ve only bought one mp3 album from Lala, but the quality sounded fine to me.
I’m not sure if I’ve uploaded my whole collection to the service or not, but most of it’s there. It’s a pretty painless process. You download their app, tell it where your music is, and let it do its thing in the background. It’s not super-quick, but it doesn’t get in the way either.
Been using Winamp Remote with great success. It streams most any music or video file directly from your PC to your web browser, your game console, or your phone. It doesn’t support DRM-protected files, so YMMV.
Looks like I’ll have to stick with Last.fm until Lala comes to the UK. Still, I love Last.fm, it’s a great way to find new music and the community side of it is cool too.
I have a hard time falling for Lala since it’s locked to the US region only. I still think the one to beat will be Last.fm…. it’s already international and the un-sung leader of all things music streaming. Because Last.fm shunned the majors when they started they’ve always been just outside of the press-release spotlight.