Neil aka skyrefuge posted this over on PM:X. I think it's an incredible service and deserves as much publicity as possible. Please pass this around.
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Lala.com
It basically does two things: stores all your music online, allowing you to stream it from anywhere, and, makes it super-super easy to check out music for free. At the moment, it's actually the second part that's most interesting to me.
Online music storage
You download an app that scans your computer for music, but instead of taking an eternity to upload it all, it detects if it already exists on their servers, and if so, instantly makes it available to you in your online "locker". They have a library of 6 million tracks (including all the majors), so it found half of my albums (about 500), which is pretty impressive considering the non-mainstream music I listen to. The tool will upload the rest the old-fashioned way, but I haven't given it the time to do that yet.
Your music library is then accessible through an interface that's basically an iTunes clone. It's surprisingly fast and smooth, and the whole experience is almost as good as playing your music from a local source: sound-quality is excellent, you can skip within tracks, make playlists, etc.
New music discovery
The best feature for me is that you can listen to any of their six million songs for free, once, with almost no effort at all. Even better, it's very simple to throw entire albums into your queue.
So lately what I've been doing when I see someone make a music recommendation here, is type the album name into the lala search box, then either listen to it immediately, or click "add to queue".
It's an experience about 1000x better than going to myspace.
- First, the site doesn't look like vomit or take ages to load. It has no ads at all.
- Second, all the streams are CD-quality. There was one album where I could hear the lossy compression, but everything else has sounded perfect.
- Third (and most important), you can listen to the entire album (and often a band's entire discography), rather than being limited to the few myspace songs an artist might have selected.
- Fourth, the queue makes things super-easy. Usually music-suggestions come to me in bunches, way faster than I can listen to them. So with the myspace method, I might listen to a couple songs from the first recommendation, but by the time those are done, I'm already off doing something else, and the other recommendations are forgotten. Or, I might not even listen to first recommendation because I don't want to stop the music I'm already listening to and switch to something else. With the queue, I can just throw a bunch of stuff in there, and it's saved for whenever I switch to "new music" mode. I'm then guaranteed to hear it eventually. It's much like throwing movies in your Netflix queue when you read release-date reviews for them.
If you want to listen more than once, you can buy an online-only version of any song for 10 cents (essentially buying a license to stream it). If you prefer the mp3, you can buy that too, at competitive prices ($8/album is common). If you've already paid your 10 cents, the mp3 price is reduced by that much, so you never have to pay twice for it.
It's almost made unauthorized downloading unnecessary.
Apparently artists get some money too, even from the free streams. Unfortunately, I believe it's only available in the US at the moment.
Over the last few days, I've listened to:
Tindersticks - The Hungry Saw and Curtains
Cales - Uncommon Excursion
Cursive - The Ugly Organ
God is an Astronaut - God is an Astronaut
Ihsahn - angL
Pin Up Went Down - 2 Unlimited
Beach House - Devotion
The Builders and the Butchers - The Builders and the Butchers
Ladytron - Velocifero
Murder By Death - Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?
Still in my queue:
Brave - Passages
Le Grand Guignol - The Great Maddening
Catfish Haven - Devastator
Fake Problems - How Far Our Bodies Go
Portishead - Third
Biomechanical - Cannibalised
Esoteric - The Maniacal Vale
Its recommendation system is apparently based more on personal recommendations and "following" other users rather than an algorithm, so if anyone is interested, my username is "skyrefuge".
Neil
*********************
Lala.com
It basically does two things: stores all your music online, allowing you to stream it from anywhere, and, makes it super-super easy to check out music for free. At the moment, it's actually the second part that's most interesting to me.
Online music storage
You download an app that scans your computer for music, but instead of taking an eternity to upload it all, it detects if it already exists on their servers, and if so, instantly makes it available to you in your online "locker". They have a library of 6 million tracks (including all the majors), so it found half of my albums (about 500), which is pretty impressive considering the non-mainstream music I listen to. The tool will upload the rest the old-fashioned way, but I haven't given it the time to do that yet.
Your music library is then accessible through an interface that's basically an iTunes clone. It's surprisingly fast and smooth, and the whole experience is almost as good as playing your music from a local source: sound-quality is excellent, you can skip within tracks, make playlists, etc.
New music discovery
The best feature for me is that you can listen to any of their six million songs for free, once, with almost no effort at all. Even better, it's very simple to throw entire albums into your queue.
So lately what I've been doing when I see someone make a music recommendation here, is type the album name into the lala search box, then either listen to it immediately, or click "add to queue".
It's an experience about 1000x better than going to myspace.
- First, the site doesn't look like vomit or take ages to load. It has no ads at all.
- Second, all the streams are CD-quality. There was one album where I could hear the lossy compression, but everything else has sounded perfect.
- Third (and most important), you can listen to the entire album (and often a band's entire discography), rather than being limited to the few myspace songs an artist might have selected.
- Fourth, the queue makes things super-easy. Usually music-suggestions come to me in bunches, way faster than I can listen to them. So with the myspace method, I might listen to a couple songs from the first recommendation, but by the time those are done, I'm already off doing something else, and the other recommendations are forgotten. Or, I might not even listen to first recommendation because I don't want to stop the music I'm already listening to and switch to something else. With the queue, I can just throw a bunch of stuff in there, and it's saved for whenever I switch to "new music" mode. I'm then guaranteed to hear it eventually. It's much like throwing movies in your Netflix queue when you read release-date reviews for them.
If you want to listen more than once, you can buy an online-only version of any song for 10 cents (essentially buying a license to stream it). If you prefer the mp3, you can buy that too, at competitive prices ($8/album is common). If you've already paid your 10 cents, the mp3 price is reduced by that much, so you never have to pay twice for it.
It's almost made unauthorized downloading unnecessary.
Apparently artists get some money too, even from the free streams. Unfortunately, I believe it's only available in the US at the moment.
Over the last few days, I've listened to:
Tindersticks - The Hungry Saw and Curtains
Cales - Uncommon Excursion
Cursive - The Ugly Organ
God is an Astronaut - God is an Astronaut
Ihsahn - angL
Pin Up Went Down - 2 Unlimited
Beach House - Devotion
The Builders and the Butchers - The Builders and the Butchers
Ladytron - Velocifero
Murder By Death - Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?
Still in my queue:
Brave - Passages
Le Grand Guignol - The Great Maddening
Catfish Haven - Devastator
Fake Problems - How Far Our Bodies Go
Portishead - Third
Biomechanical - Cannibalised
Esoteric - The Maniacal Vale
Its recommendation system is apparently based more on personal recommendations and "following" other users rather than an algorithm, so if anyone is interested, my username is "skyrefuge".
Neil
