Just launched: LaLa is offering users the ability to listen to an unlimited amount of on-demand streaming music, for free, marking the first time this has been available legally. Their new tag line is “Play albums on demand, buy the ones you love.”
We wrote about this product a week ago, although the final launch product has additional features we did not cover in that post. The service is available here.
The company is pursuing music licensing deals with labels and will make music available as those deals are closed. Warner Music is their first partner, and will make their full digital catalog available.
The new LaLa is aimed squarely at iTunes. Users can listen to full songs as often as they like. They can buy the physical CD with a couple of clicks, or they can (in a week or so) download the song. The songs are DRM-free, but are downloaded directly to the iPod. The only way for a user to then remove them is to hack the iPod. So while the songs do not contain DRM, the user is effectively barred from consuming the song cross-platform. The company says that future versions of the service will allow CD burning as well.
Prices for song downloads will be $0.99, the company says, but will vary for high-use users. If you listen to a lot of music on LaLa and participate in the community, song prices will be lower.
The digital tracks will be watermarked .aac files. They won’t stop you from transferring the songs to friends iPods, but the service will only allow one licensed copy of that watermarked file to work on Lala at a time.
The service launch is part of huge bet Lala is making on the future of online music. Licensing fees alone are expected to cost the company $140 million over the next two years. They’ll need an average revenue of $65 per user per year to cover the cost. But Lala sees the new service as an essential update to the way we experience and purchase music.
Lala’s bet is based on two beliefs: people want to own their music, and they want to sample it in the most interactive way possible. They saw the radio’s passive sampling experience evolving into Napster’s on demand experience. But Napster was illegal, and didn’t let you easily sync music where you wanted it. Lala’s new service promises a higher quality and more comprehensive service than has ever come before.
65 bones per user is a lot. obviously this couldnt be a static number as it could go up or down based on how large or small their membership is.
I love when businesses tweak their business model. I smell a 3x/4x CEO at the helm. Wouldn’t be surprised if they settle in on another biz model once something better than warner music appears
Is even iTunes getting that much per user? I don’t know if any music store can boast that much.
Watch music companies come in very quickly and try to take a little piece of that action. That $65 per user will jump up much higher very soon.
Could it be Zune-tastic?
http://www.spar...inute.com/?p=63
David
Maybe I’m not the typical consumer, but I really don’t see how a service that depends on people buying lots of CDs will survive: I certainly haven’t bought CDs for many, many years. Well, ok, sometimes — at $2 a pop when buying them used. But between P2P, iTunes, and the legions of music subscription services (Yahoo Music Jukebox is my current choice) it seems tough to believe that the trend will be for buying CDs for the early adopters.
I will definitely be checking this out. I wonder if it will work with the iPhone…
The site seems to be done. Good while it lasted or did it get Dugg?
Seriously, guys, stop using the words “owning music.” That includes you, Steve Jobs. To paraphrase The Princess Price, it does not mean what you think it means.
site’s down. thaz no good
Its the on demand aspect that the Internet provides which makes it difficult to convince the consumer to purchase music in the per-unit fashion.
Deadpool within 18 months.
mp3.com launched an identical concept over five years ago and was shut down by an RIAA/label lawsuit. The DMCA doesn’t allow them to “authenticate” ownership and stream server-based copies to end users. I would be very surprised to see this one last long. Doesn’t look like they did their homework or got competent legal advice.
@ pg
They probably only “authenticate” songs that are owned by Warner Bros. (or anyone else they have special deals with). I’d be very surprised if they’d messed up that big.
As for the service, the quality is awful. Definitely not 128 kbps. And the stream rebuffers every 10 seconds. Hopefully the rebuffering will clear up as they recover from TC/Digg, but 32 kbps, or whatever it is, basically kills this service (unless they slide bit rate for high volume, which would be awfully fancy).
Furthermore, I just don’t see how this can be profitable.
I welcome their lost members with open arms!
That’s a great idea. I’m gonna post 30GB of music, a good portion of which I don’t even know where I got it from.
They’ll get eaten alive with bandwidth costs and legal fees. And they’ll have a database of presumably pirated material (if you’ve got b-sides and differently formatted tracks off the same disc, odds are you didn’t rip it).
… So while the songs do not contain DRM, the user is effectively barred from consuming the song cross-platform ….
…. “but the service will only allow one licensed copy of that watermarked file to work on Lala at a time” ….
and how is that not Digital Rights Manangement (DRM)? I have not that many problems with DRM, but this ’smells’ like DRM and if its not i’m missing some new buzzwords to hide the D** word.
cheers,
Hendrik
deadpool within 12 months
I’m really happy with my digital music setup. I buy from eMusic and iTunes. Sync to an iPod. Make playlists with The Filter and then profile it all on last.fm. Things don’t need to be more complicated – and I don’t need to stream what I already own. I’m not sure where this service fits in.
I just uploaded about 10 GBs of music and it’s really nice. I even synch’d my iPod from work even though the music is on the Web. I kept worrying about how long they would last before being sued, and then I found the bit.
First, their tool enables you to upload the music. Second, they’re licensing the playback from the record companies. The fixed the two key things that MP3.com didn’t do – they talked to the record industry and they didn’t use the same scheme that got MP3 sued.
I even bought a CD this morning. I listened to an album a couple of times and decided they had good prices. It’s a bit strange but it worked on me.
@Noah: Sounds good enough to my tin ear. I’m gonna buy that new Wilco sooner or later, but being able to listen to it while doin’ my computin’ is worth less-than-ideal sound quality.
I like the 18 month prediction for dead pool
– $60 a user / yr … is not acceptable ..
– Their play on demand player – has literally ‘no interface’
– it goes as a icon on your taskbar / then you click and can say track forward or stop (no pause) ….
– can only track forward 5x a hour.
– Not a good idea / amazingly got far though
actually, i like their service. being able to hear all songs in full length online gets me in the mood of buying some of them for my ipod.
why did they change their website design ? the one beforehand was as least as nice as the one now.
I listened to a few tracks this morning, & I agree that the quality is pretty bad. It does serve a purpose, though. I listened to an album that I’ve been curios about for a while. I decided to add it to my Want List (which is the same as buying to me). I’ve been doing the same thing with Pandora for a while now. The beauty with this though, is that I can choose which songs I want to hear when.
I can’t understand why i need an ipod for this service. In Holland, there’s a site that just plays the albums using flash. You can listen the complete albums as many times as you like, until the album disappears from the site:
http://3voor12....nl/luisterpaal/
They don’t sell music on this site though, because they want to stay independent (it’s a public radio station). But i found myself buying an album (somewhere else) after listening to it here quite a few times.
It’s a legal service, in case you were wondering.
belch
ps:
http://blog.fas...tml?partner=rss
what if you do not own an ipod? nor ever plan on owning one?
Have anyone heard of Spotify.com? I just saw a demo of their itunes-like player and it was very impressive. Search for any type of music and it is playable and replayable at any time. (given that you are online)
From what I have heard the client streams music using bittorrent technology, and both quality and buffering was superb!
anyways…. just thought to give a heads up
//Anders Fredriksson
the first to do this? I could have swore there have been a handful of sites like this where they have LEGALLY streamed music for free, excluding sites that extract music from blogs
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Anyone notice that the red arrows on the CD listings all went away? Appears that playlists will all allow full tracks, but “on demand, find a cd and play it” has been removed; some do have 30 second samples like the old days.