Lala.com Review: Streaming and Downloadable Music Delivery Done Right

I ran into a great new service today called Lala.com, and after several hours of testing (read: listening) I'm totally impressed.

It looks like they've been around for several years as a CD trading service, but recently re-launched with a sweet set of new features. In a nutshell, Lala.com is:

• Free Accounts (no monthly subscription fees like Rhapsody.com)!
• On-demand streaming music from their library of select songs (usually about five to ten songs per artists).
  
• Ability to purchase "web songs" and "web albums" for 10 cents / song. A web song is new concept for me. It's a persistent instance of the song that lives on lala.com. You can play the song from any Internet-accessible device that runs Flash 9.
• You can also purchase full DRM-free MP3's and CD's if you like at the bargain price of 79 cents each.
• Finally, you can "upload" your existing music collection and store your library in the cloud. But, when they say "upload" they really really mean "matching." So if you songs already exist in the lala.com library, they simply indicate that you've already purchased them (saving you the bandwidth and saving themselves the storage).

The end result is:

• A pretty great way to find and listen to new music for free.
• A simple shopping experience that's DRM-free.
• A low-barrier mechanism for managing your music online.

For me, this is a really exciting marriage of the buy vs. rent online music services, and I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

One con worth mentioning is that their "Music Mover" application was a little buggy and the transcoder crashed on my PC several times.

Also, the Flash 9 requirement means it doesn't yet work on the iPhone.