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.

Online Music Stores Change Pricing

Apple announced today that the iTunes Store would implement variable pricing of songs, which means that songs are now priced at either $.69, $.99, or $1.29. My initial reaction was to be further annoyed with iTunes (I've previously expressed my frustration with the iTunes Store -- see this post) for raising their prices, and I figured that this would be an opportunity for Amazon and Lala to gain some market share if they maintained their current pricing. Unfortunately, I discovered to my dismay that all three sites -- yes, Lala too -- had adopted similar pricing breakdowns for their mp3 stores. Upon further examination, however, I discovered that most of the music that I listen to is still priced at $.99. It seems, at least for now, that only mainstream new releases have been bumped up to $1.29. Apparently sometimes it pays to listen to more obscure music than the average human. Hopefully this isn't a sign that online music stores plan to collude and raise their prices, but I'm afraid that's exactly what it is. Oh well, there's always eMusic!

The Golden Age of Music

A recent New York Times article about the popularity of the South by Southwest Music Festival begins by proclaiming that "music still has fans," as if the author were surprised to find evidence that people still listen to music and show up to see their favorites bands perform in person.

The author clearly has missed the point, and it seems that a lot of people are making the wrong conclusions about what's currently taking place in the music industry. Yes, there has been -- and will continue to be -- a significant decline in the number of physical copies of albums sold; the sale of digital music, however, is increasing rapidly, and this bodes well for the future of music. Granted, it doesn't seem that digital sales have yet made up for the drop in CD sales, but I believe there's reason to be hopeful if you can look past a few common misconceptions about what's taking place.

Most people seem to view consumers' decreased willingness to pay more than $10 for an album (I can remember when I regularly paid $17 for CDs about ten years ago) as a drop in their demand for music. What this is, in fact, is an increase in the supply of music, which, as you should know from basic economic theory, causes its price to drop. Before digital music was available, consumers were forced to buy hard copies of albums from record stores. Consumers can still do this, of course, but they also have a multitude of other options to choose from when deciding where, and in what format, to buy music. This trend may be bad for big records labels, but it sure hasn't been bad for iTunes.

Smaller bands and labels also benefit significantly from the ability to distribute their music online. It used to be that the main concern of an up-and-coming band was to get noticed by a label because they needed help promoting and distributing their music. Now bands are much more able to focus on writing and recording music, and are able to reach out more directly to consumers online.

Most important to you and me, however, are the benefits to consumers. I recently met with the CEO of Lala (the music site you've likely heard me raving about), and he argued that right now is the "golden age of music." It's not hard to agree with him when considering how much better off the average music listener is as a result of the availability of digital music. It is significantly easier and cheaper today than ever before to discover, purchase, and listen to new music, and to take that music with you wherever you go.

Music, however, has not become free. Granted, you can sit online and download torrents all day, or you can mooch mp3's off your friends, but I say if you're a real fan of an artist or band, support them. Buy their music and merchandise, and see them live. Otherwise, they're going to quit making music, or they're going to sign to a major label and alter their sound to reach a larger audience, which is almost always bad. So get on Lala (or iTunes, eMusic, Amazon, or whatever) and download some music, and keep in mind that you're getting a lot more music for your money ($.10 for a web song?!) than was ever possible before.

"Uhhhh" Podcast

I have a friend who has a bizarre habit of saying, "uhhhhhh" whenever he/she hears a song that has a certain sound (I've refrained from specifying their gender so as to protect the identity of the innocent). I'm not sure I can describe in words the type of songs that might evoke this response, so I've begun this week's podcast with "Spliff Mood" by Ooklah the Moc, which almost always brings out an "uhhhhh" from him/her. Listen to about 2 or 3 seconds of it and see if you don't feel the strange desire to make this grunt/groaning noise. The mix gets progressively more mellow and ends with a nice, relaxed reggae song. The playlist is eclectic -- it even includes a rap song (!) -- but hopefully not so much that it doesn't flow.

Also, I'm going to try using a Lala playlist as well as a podcast to provide more listening options, so let me know what you think. Enjoy!

Click here for the podcast.

Uhhhhhhh

New Ways to Find and Enjoy Music Online

Judging by the 6 billion songs that have been downloaded though Apple's iTunes Store and the more than 173 million iPods the company has sold, it is clear that many people embrace digital music. And it's a safe bet that digital music will continue to grow in popularity as the internet makes it progressively easier and cheaper to discover and listen to music.

In this post, I'd like to highlight and compare some of the online music services that I have used over the past several years: the iTunes Store, Amazon's MP3 store, eMusic, and Lala.



The iTunes Store: For a while, iTunes was my clear choice for purchasing digital music. Their selection is pretty comprehensive, their prices are cheaper than buying CDs, and it's easy to sync iTunes music with an iPod. The only drawback is that much of their catalog is DRM-protected, meaning there are restrictions to how many computers the music can play on and how many CDs it can be burned onto. Apple is fazing DRM-protection out of the iTunes Store, but I bought quite a few songs with DRM-protection that Apple is now asking me to pay for again in order to get DRM-free versions, which annoys me, so I've chosen to boycot the iTunes Store whenever possible.


Amazon MP3: Amazon's selling point is that (1) they offer their entire catalog of MP3s without DRM-protection, (2) the bit rate (i.e., sound quality) of the songs is higher than the average song in the iTunes store, and (3) their prices are slightly lower than in the iTunes Store. The experience on the Amazon website isn't quite as nice as that in the iTunes store, but that's not important to me.


eMusic: I recently joined eMusic, and I love it. The service is subscription-based, so you pay for a package that allows you a specific number of downloads each month. Depending on the package you choose, the average cost of a song ranges from $.25 to $.60, significantly less than songs from iTunes or Amazon. Glaringly absent, however, is music from the "Big Four" record labels, so a lot of mainstream music isn't available. This means it's probably not possible to rely completely on eMusic to get all the music you want, though it sure has a lot of good stuff. The site features interesting editorial content and a music recommendation service through which I've found a lot of good, eclectic music that I might never have discovered (or been able to afford) otherwise -- jazz from the early 1900s, old Hawaiian music, minimal electronic, and lots of "indie" music.


Lala: I only signed up for Lala yesterday, but so far I'm blown away. Lala's model is certainly going to cause a stir, and it wouldn't surprise me if they give the above-listed incumbents a run for their money. By far the coolest feature is the fact that Lala automatically syncs your current music library with their catalog of 6 million songs, allowing you to listen to any song in your library as many times as you want through their site. Even better, any song in your library that's not in the Lala catalog is uploaded and stored in "the cloud", meaning you can listen to any song in your library on any computer through the Lala site. They also allow you to hear any song in their catalog once -- all the way through -- while iTunes, Amazon, and eMusic only allow you a 30-second preview. Then, if you like what you heard, you can pay $.10 for a "web song", which you can listen to as many times as you want through the Lala site. If you decide you really like the song/album, you can download the MP3, and what you paid for the web song counts towards the purchase price, which is competitive with Amazon and iTunes. If this doesn't seem revolutionary to you, consider the fact that Lala makes it possible to listen to your music library on any computer anywhere there's internet. The day when the internet is everywhere and available on every device is probably not far off, which means that it won't be long before you can listen to any music you want, whenever and wherever. I expect Lala to have an iPhone app out at some point (that is, unless Apple decides to nix it in order to reduce the threat Lala poses), and then maybe I won't even have to put MP3s on my iPhone anymore.

Another cool thing about Lala is that you can embed songs in blogs! Check out this song, which I actually discovered thanks to eMusic, but it's now also available to me wherever I have a computer and internet (I think you can only listen to it once, but hey, if you like it you might be willing to pay $.10 to be able to hear it as many times as you want):

Tunnelvision - Here We Go Magi...

Yes, these online music stores sure do make it easy and cheap to find and obtain new music. Technology can be great! But sometimes I feel the urge to sit by the fire and listen to an album on a record player. Eh, nevermind -- I'm too lazy to get off the couch.