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email this storyLala Review: Take Your Music On The Road
Posted by: Spencer // December 03 2009
A few years ago, a website called MP3Tunes promised to allow you to have your music wherever you go. Their service required that you upload music from your computer to their servers. From there you could log into any browser to listen to your music. It never seemed to work quite right, though, and then MP3Tunes ran into the RIAA. The site is still around, but it never took off.
Fast-forward four years, and here comes Lala.com. Lala is a different take on digital music. You can buy music in different formats, listen to full albums for free, and upload your music to your account, allowing you to listen to your music wherever you have access to a browser. There’s even an iPhone application in the works.
Sampling Music
On Amazon or iTunes, you have a 30 second track to base your decision on. On Lala you can listen to any one track once, all the way through. You can make decisions based on listening to a full song, not a snippet.
Buying Music
You have two options for buying music on Lala – you can buy full access to on the Lala website for 10 cents a track or less. Once you’ve purchased a web album or single, you can listen to that purchase anywhere you have access to the Internet through a browser. Your second option is to purchase full MP3 tracks. The average bitrate for the MP3 albums is 256 kilobits per second (kbps). This works just like Amazon’s MP3 store – you download a helper application, click and buy. Lala does accept Paypal unlike Amazon or iTunes. If you previously purchased a web album or single, you’ll receive a credit towards buying the MP3.
Upload Your Music
Lala’s game-changing feature is the ability to upload music from your computer to your online account. The process is fairly simple with Lala’s Music Mover. The music isn’t actually uploaded, but matched to music in the Lala database. If the tracks aren’t in the Lala database, you can upload an actual file. Once you’ve moved your music, you can listen to it by simply logging on to the Lala website.
Recently Lala signed a deal with Google and is being featured when you search on a song or album on Google, you’re presented with the ability to listen to tracks via Lala. The pricing on Lala is also worth mentioning. An MP3 album generally costs around $7.99 and a web album costs about $1.50, beating Amazon and iTunes on price. The iPhone application will make the service that much better, essentially increasing the storage on your iPhone exponentially.
Bottom line – Lala doesn’t have the deals that Amazon MP3 has, and it isn’t as slick as iTunes, but I think it might replace both as my go-to online music store.
