I found out about a new service called Lala this week. This is a service that seems to have two major purposes: First, to provide a way for you to access your entire music library anywhere with an internet connection, without having your iPod, or your computer, or your massive external hard drive with all of those MP3’s. Second, like Rhapsody type services, to provide a way for you to discover and buy new music through a few social networking features. There is no monthly service fee to use Lala, and using it only to store and access your existing music library is free. I’m guessing they hope to make their money when you start poking around their catalog, and buying tracks.
The service sounded interesting to me, so I gave it a shot and signed up. From just a little use, including getting my music all setup online, using its interface, and exploring some of its catalog, I can say that I like the idea a lot. Here’s a few words about what I’ve found so far.
Getting Access to Your Music Anywhere
To accomplish this feat, Lala provides you with the “LalaMover”, a small program to download which scans your computer for music you own. (The program runs on Windows and Mac.) It then does one of two things: First, it attempts to match each file on your computer to one of the tracks Lala already has online. If it finds a match, it simply gives you access to that track, and saves you from having to upload that file. Second, if no match is found, it actually uploads your file onto its servers. Matching tracks is a great idea, as it potentially could save hours and hours of uploading your own music, and it certainly saves space on Lala’s servers.
Out of 2200 tracks in my library, Lala matched 680 tracks, meaning over 1500 tracks had to be uploaded, a process which took from late in the morning until well after midnight to complete. Still, even that pain is a one time deal. From now on, if I buy a new album, or add a few tracks to iTunes, the LalaMover program will sync those tracks online relatively quickly. Also, two thirds of my library is classical music, which stretches the naming and cataloguing conventions used, and – let’s face it – isn’t as popular as modern music, so I’m not surprised so much of my music was not “matched”. Those of you have more Linkin Park than Beethoven in your libraries are more likely to get more of your tracks matched.
Playing Music on Lala
The whole idea Lala acknowledges – and depends on – is that internet access is so ubiquitous and fast these days that streaming music to listen to works well enough that storing your library locally becomes less and less important. I think the success of Lala’s service stands or falls on that. After setting up my entire library online, and playing some tunes on it, I can say that, so far, it worked without a hitch.
Every song I played streamed without pause, skipping, or interruption, and seemed to be of a decent audio quality. I tried this at home, where I have 8MB per second cable internet access. I’d be very interested to see how it performs on a slower internet connection, or a public place, like a free Wi-Fi spot at a coffee shop.
Almost every single track I owned was successfully imported into Lala. The only exceptions were a few Mahler Symphony tracks which exceeded the 52 MB size limit. Also, all the playlists I had in iTunes were automatically imported. Speaking of iTunes, you’ll notice that Lala’s interface of your library looks very similar to Apple’s program, as the image to the left shows. (You can click on the image for a larger version.) This is probably a good move, as so many people who use iTunes will be instantly familiar with using Lala.
Discovering New Music on Lala
You can get new music from Lala’s catalog by browsing and searching through its 6 million available tracks. To help your search, it lets you listen to each track in full one time without having to pay for it. Better than the standard “30 second preview”, in my opinion.
Lala provides two ways to purchase music: web songs and MP3 downloads. Buying a “web song” lets you add a track from Lala’s catalog to your library and stream it an unlimited amout of times. Web songs cost 10 cents each. Incidentally, new users get 50 free web songs in order to help get you started.
The second method is to actually buy and download MP3 files. This gives you the ability to stream from your online library like the web songs, and, of course, gives you a local copy that works with any software and portable media player. MP3 files cost between 79 and 99 cents. Unlike most of Apple’s iTunes Store library, these tracks are completely DRM free.
So what about its 10 cent web songs? That’s definitely dirt cheap, but you can only listen to those tracks when connected to the internet. However, even with something like an iPod Touch, if you can hook up to a Wi-Fi network, you’re covered. Not only are you covered, but you suddenly have access to much more music than even a 16GB iPod could ever hold. Further, Lala says it plans to release an iPhone App soon, meaning that, even if you’re on the road somewhere, you could still theoretically stream music to your iPhone. Considering this, the 10 cent web songs seem to be a real bargain – if all this technology works as advertised. If you must have a copy of the track, however, you do have the option of downloading the MP3’s at the standard price.
In further efforts to help you buy their tracks, Lala provides some social networking that enables you to follow other users, and get feeds of music they’re listening to, tracks they’ve bought, etc. Users can also review music, share playlists, and embed music in places like blogs to further “spread the word”. If a user listens to a track from your music feed, then buys that track, you are credited with “influencing” that user, and get points for it. I’m guessing that the more points you get, the more prominence you achieve as someone worth following.
The Verdict
Overall, I’m impressed with how easy it is to use Lala, how easy it was to upload my music, and how well it seems to work so far. It pulled off the iTunes-in-the-sky concept very well.
Lala seems to strike an interesting middle-of-the-road approach between the strictly “purchase and download each track” concept of iTunes, and the “all you can eat” subscription model of services like Rhapsody. I’m currently a Rhapsody subscriber, and I’m wondering, based on our usage level of Rhapsody, which would be cheaper – to buy 150 web songs a month from Lala, or to pay the $15 Rhapsody monthly subscription fee? Also, as a Mac user, I would absolutely love it if Rhapsody were to provide a way of uploading all of our tracks online, so we could access our entire library and all of our subscription tracks, since Rhapsody’s desktop software only works on Windows. (Rhapsody? Are you listening?) But this is a review of Lala, not Rhapsody, so moving on…
I also think the social networking features show promise. If I knew someone and trusted their taste in music, you bet I would check out what they were listening to before blindly stumbling through the catalog myself. The problem is finding those people! To that end, if you want to try Lala, tell me in a comment below. I’ll invite you to Lala via email, then we should already be following each other once you sign up. Of course, that’s only to your advantage if you happen to enjoy lots of classical music!
As the weeks go by, I’ll keep you posted on how I like Lala as I continue to use it, and whether the whole iTunes-in-the-sky concept works anywhere near as consistently as iTunes-on-your-desktop.
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[...] few weeks ago, I reviewed the new Lala Music Service. At the time, my first impressions were that it was an interesting concept that was done well [...]