Lately I’ve been largely internet-less at home, which is driving me insane since I use the web like my reserve brain. [As a result, I have been dumb for some time now.] But when I am online I’ve gotten completely hooked on lala.com. It has totally changed the way I think about sharing and listening to music.
Like any music site Lala is limited by their ability to license content, but I have yet to reach the limits of my imagination. I can crawl my friend network and discover artists while they do. I can get recommendations and gift songs to my buddies. I can fill my ‘forecast’, the top four tracks I think everyone should listen to, that everyone sees when they land on my page. The friend network is well integrated- shared listening history, song recommendations. Search offers a wealth of useful content, especially if you’re groping in the dark. But what will it cost me??
1) First of all, they’ve licensed a pretty massive collection and you can listen to any song once all the way through at the time of your choosing. Once you join for free, you get 50 credits to put one song per credit in your online collection, subject to unlimited plays and playlist creation. After that, you can pay $0.10 per song for unlimited online use, or a full album ($0.80 for an 8 song album).
2) There is also the option of downloading DRM-free for a very competitive price of $0.89 per song with pretty big savings on whole albums.Â
3) You can download the LalaMover app which will crawl your hard drive for songs and give you the online rights to any song it recognizes, which for me was about 90% of an 8 GB library.
BUT the best part is queueing up five or six albums and artists you’ve always wanted to check out and listening to them all the way through with the ability to pause and start up where you left off.
A major limitation is the lack of obscure new stuff like Jaydiohead, yes you guessed it, Jay-Z on top of Radiohead. My personal favorites are Dirt Off Your Android and Ignorant Swan, thanks to The Sixty One. Join up and download for free.
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I totally recommend lala. Come find me and we’ll share music!
