Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Lala’s New Business Model May Be Good, But I Don’t Like it

Re: Lala’s New Business Model May Be Good, But I Don’t Like it

Nick — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:42:06 -0000

The best thing about Lala's music service is the fact that you can import your entire music library onto its servers and never have to worry about transferring. I love Lala, but I never use it to actually purchase music, I just use it to access it from anywhere.

Re: Lala’s New Business Model May Be Good, But I Don’t Like it

Steven — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:19:43 -0000

but I still think that any business model that somehow restricts your rights to do whatever you want with the music youâ€™ve legally purchased is, well, too restrictive.
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How is it restrictive? What are you not comprehending? You mention restrict/restriction/restrictive several times in your post. There's nothing restrictive about lala.com. Just pay the standard price for the full download, just like itunes or amazon, and you're good to go. What are you missing? Or, why are you sidestepping this fact? Kind of silly and pointless. To talk about restrictions where there are none.

Re: Lala’s New Business Model May Be Good, But I Don’t Like it

Jarred Taylor — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:50:42 -0000

Stan, you didn't look at the whole picture. You don't mention that any song you for which you buy streaming rights at the $0.10 price can also be downloaded as an MP3 for an additional $0.79... still cheaper overall than iTunes and, I presume, DRM-free. So you are not locked into their service. If you want to free the song from the cloud, you pay a little more. It's brilliant.

Yes, the $0.10 price tag should be understood as what it is: the right to stream a song an unlimited number of times from the cloud. This makes sense for people who mostly listen to music when they're wired at work or at home. But as devices like the iPhone and Android phones increase our ability to connect on the go at high speeds, we'll be increasingly enveloped by the cloud and able to access our content (almost) anywhere.

You also overlook that Lala scans your iTunes library and allows you to access your music that you already own for free online. They first scan your music and match it to content in their databases, and then they upload any non-DRM music that they didn't have into your account. In other words, Lala is anything but restrictive: it puts your music you already own into the cloud for free, and gives you a cheap way to buy new music for cloud-based access. For an additional price -- combined with the 10 cents, still cheaper than iTunes -- you can download the MP3 of what you've purchased. Where's the restriction? I only see freedom...

Also, have you had an experience of a song streamed from Lala being of dubious sound quality? I've only been using it for a few hours, but so far it matches Pandora in quality and to my ear, I haven't experienced any major quality issues.

Re: Lala’s New Business Model May Be Good, But I Don’t Like it

Emily Williams — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:00:49 -0000

Overall some good points to consider. But this question seems a bit irrelevant: "Why should I pay for something that might turn out to be useless or obsolete in a few years time?" The same question could be asked not only of other music forms - cassettes, CDs, etc - but of all technology. While I fully agree that there are some technologies that look as thought they'll become useless far too quickly, and Lala may be one of them, if we let the fact that things will become obsolete hold us back, we'd never move forward.