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Oct 21 2008 3:42pm EDT
Lala's Bold New Music Model
Kevin Maney writes: I've been talking with Bill Nguyen about his music service ambitions since he launched the original version of Lala a few years ago. At the time, Lala was just a way for people to trade used CDs, and the site had limited appeal. But Nguyen is one of the most energetic and optimistic entrepreneurs I've ever met. (Among the tech entrepreneur crowd, that's really saying something.) He kept watching the trends and hammering at the possibilities, and now he's come up with a site that will make a lot of people rethink the way they consume music.
Lala's big innovation is the 10-cent streaming song. Once you sign up for Lala, you can listen to any of the 6 million songs in its library one time for free. If you like a song and you want to keep listening to it, you can "buy" it for 10 cents. But you're not downloading the song -- just buying the right to stream it from Lala's server as much as you want, through any browser on any PC or device.
Then, if you really want to own the song so you can dump it into a portable player or burn a CD, you can buy it for 79 cents.
Lala goes one more important step further by recreating the kind of service you used to get through MyMP3.com -- until the record labels shut it down. Lala will search the music library on your hard drive. Songs you own that are on Lala's database -- you automatically get full rights to stream that song with no limits. Songs you own that aren't on Lala's databse get uploaded to Lala so you CAN stream them from any PC or device anywhere.
Ultimately, Lala combines off-line music players like iTunes, streaming services like imeem, and MP3 stores like Amazon, and pulls it all into one, simple browser-based player. There are no subscription fees and no ads on the site.
"When you say music is going to the cloud, people don't get it and say, 'Where's my off-line connection?'" Nguyen says. "We're saying, just watch."
Lala, in fact, seems like another significant leap toward the end of music as a product and a future of music as a service. It's the beginning of the end of the iPod era. "If you can listen to music without the file -- why would you want the file?" Nguyen says.
