As we reported back in May, online music site lala.com was working with $20 million of Warner and some other investors money to set up a song "rental site where ten cents buys you the right to stream a song indefinitely from your online "locker. As of yesterday, the launch is official: www.lala.com is up and running as a music store, streaming site and personal music access point.
The site was originally launched in 2006 as a CD trading place and then relaunched as a free web music browser before this third "launch. Its goal is to provide the best of both worlds: an iTunes-style music store with MySpace-like free music streaming.
The deal: sign up and listen to any of the six million songs in the catalogue once for free. If you want to listen again, you can either pay ten cents to put the song in your personal listening space and stream it as much as you like or pay 99 cents (minus the ten if youve already paid it) to download the track as a DRM-free MP3. More importantly, you can upload all of your own music to your space and stream it as much as you want for free. So basically, its a web interface to a personal jukebox culled from your own CDs and MP3s youve bought online, accessible anywhere.
Its that second point that is getting people excited, prompting terms like "game-changer to be thrown around. Before you get too excited though, the streaming is not available from Canada, yet. When you go to play a track, a message informs you that "music for international users will be available soon. In the meantime, you can use one of those Pandora workarounds visit a proxy redirect server like this one, which can route your requests through a U.S. site.
The site was originally launched in 2006 as a CD trading place and then relaunched as a free web music browser before this third "launch. Its goal is to provide the best of both worlds: an iTunes-style music store with MySpace-like free music streaming.
The deal: sign up and listen to any of the six million songs in the catalogue once for free. If you want to listen again, you can either pay ten cents to put the song in your personal listening space and stream it as much as you like or pay 99 cents (minus the ten if youve already paid it) to download the track as a DRM-free MP3. More importantly, you can upload all of your own music to your space and stream it as much as you want for free. So basically, its a web interface to a personal jukebox culled from your own CDs and MP3s youve bought online, accessible anywhere.
Its that second point that is getting people excited, prompting terms like "game-changer to be thrown around. Before you get too excited though, the streaming is not available from Canada, yet. When you go to play a track, a message informs you that "music for international users will be available soon. In the meantime, you can use one of those Pandora workarounds visit a proxy redirect server like this one, which can route your requests through a U.S. site.