Lala Just Keeps Getting Better

Lala announced this week that they've made a minor but important improvement to the functionality of their site by allowing users to rate songs. Lala has always been a great vehicle for discovering music, mostly because (a) you can see what your friends are listening to, and (b) you can listen for free to a full-length version of any of the 6 million+ songs in their catalog. Until now, however, Lala wasn't particularly attractive as a music player because it didn't allow you to easily separate good songs from bad ones. Whereas previously you had to manually create a playlist if you wished to continuously listen to only "good" songs from multiple artists/albums/genres, you can now simply exclude from your play queue songs that are below a certain rating. This feature allows for a more hands-off listening experience, and makes the site much more attractive as a music player.

The song ratings are also nice because they enable you to see not only what songs your friends are listening to, but which ones they like. If you trust your Lala friends' music tastes -- and the assumption is that you do, since you voluntarily subject yourself to a live feed of everything they listen to on the site -- you now have the option of avoiding songs that they don't give a favorable rating to.

In a recent conversation with Lala co-founder Billy Alvarado, I was told that the company will continue to add functionality to their site every few weeks. We also talked about the mobile application they're developing for the iPhone (and other devices, as well), which he says will be out "soon." They're still working out how to best make money from the app, and I imagine they're having to contend with other issues as well. It's hard to believe that Apple will simply approve an application that would take business away from the iTunes Store. And a mobile application that allows users to stream music from the cloud would fundamentally change the landscape of digital music distribution and consumption, so there are likely a lot of other people that will need to sign off on the idea, too. Regardless, Lala is doing great things, and look for them to continue to roll out new features every few weeks (check the company's blog for the latest changes they've made to the site). Below is a TechCruch video demo of the iPhone app.