Many who follow the online music world closely are already familiar with music streaming sites like Lala.com and its European counterpart Spotify.com. Undoubtedly, you have Googled one of your favorite bands or a new artist that you are interested in, and songs off their Lala artist page appear at the top of your Google search results. Welcome to the new model of accessing music: streaming.
This new model combines the instantaneous nature of internet radio stations like Pandora and Last.fm with the music player layout characteristic of traditional online music stores (most notably Itunes). However, the Lala music store is entirely online and keeps your music files online too. When one signs up for Lala, they can play over 8 million songs for free off Lala.com. If one downloads the Lala Music Player one can still stream for free, but to eliminate searching for specific songs over and over again the listener has the option to buy a song for 10 cents and keep it in their Lala library. When a listener downloads the music player, the application searches the listener’s computer for existent music and adds it to their Lala player- all for free. Lala is the U.S. leader of the latest crop of digital music distribution models all geared towards streaming music instantly rather than possessing it. Why take up the hard drive space to store you music when it is cheaper to buy music though Lala and then have it stored online. The argument Lala begs you to consider: why is worth owning music in 2010 anyway?
Apples acquisition of Lala last month will surely bring us a new potential leader for playing music online. Although already #1, it is expected that Itunes will consider Lala's successes when fully developing their latest version of the Itunes music store, and maybe even launch a new online version of Itunes akin to Lala. Either way, it is no surprise that the kings of Web 2.0; Apple, Google, and Microsoft, all showed interest in buying Lala last month. As already stated, Apple prevailed over these companies, but that does not mean we shouldn’t expect Lala’s future to be limited to Apple products. It is curious to note why Lala songs jump to number one on all Google search results for musicians. It seems there might be more in store for this relatively small music website than I formerly anticipated.
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This is very interesting because recently Universal decided to share its music with Free All Music. Therefore on Free All Music it is now possible to download legally songs and this for free!!! The only condition is to watch a commercial when downloading each song. There has been progress and in a couple of years music will be completely free and accessible to all to download. Other websites will use the exact same system as Universal.
ReplyDeleteThis is a complex issue. Attali, whom we'll read later in the semester, makes an observation that we collect music as objects. Not because of the music, but because of its value as an object. Now that music (as mp3s, etc. are not objects, is that changing?
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