None of the companies involved will confirm the new Google Music service – we have “no comments” or absolute silence from Google, LaLa, MySpace and iLike. But the new service is all but confirmed. And we have the screenshots showing how the service, which will be announced on October 28, will look to prove it.
Matt Ghering, a product marketing manager at Google, has been one of the people talking to the big four music labels about the new service, we’ve heard from one of our sources. And he has supposedly sent these screenshots of the look and feel of Google Music search to various rights holders and potential partners.
The first screenshot shows how a search result might look on Google for a search for “U2.” A picture of the band is to the left of four streaming options for various songs, and the user has the option of listening via either iLike or LaLa. Click on one of the results, and a player pops up from the services that streams the song, along with an option to purchase the song for download. → Read More
blueTunes, a streaming music site that lets you stream your music library from the cloud to any computer, is launching a new desktop app tonight that looks to make the service an even more compelling alternative to other online music sites and possibly even iTunes.
For those who aren’t familiar with the service, blueTunes lets you scan your hard drive for music files and upload them to the site’s servers, which you can then stream from wherever you are. This process would take a very long time (and quite a bit of bandwidth) were it not for a shortcut the site is employing: while you still have to prove that you own your music (the site uses a Java app to check through you music folders), the site only makes you upload songs that aren’t already in its database. In other words, unless you’ve got a really eclectic collection, you’ll be able to transfer your library to the cloud without having to move many files. → Read More
Easily my favorite app on the Android platform is Imeem. It’s simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to listen to a huge range of music for free. And now it’s coming to the iPhone, we’ve learned.
The Imeem app has already been submitted for App Store approval and could be released any day, we’re hearing from a reliable source. In terms of what it will offer, you can probably expect it to be about the same as the Android version. That means access to Imeem’s library of music and perhaps more importantly, access to your own collection of songs from the cloud, if you use Imeem’s MyMusic service to put your music on their servers. → Read More
How bad are things getting for music streaming startups? We knew that imeem was on the verge of shutting down before getting a last-minute cash infusion from some of its investors, but an SEC filing from Warner Music adds some more details about exactly how dire imeem’s situation is, as well as that of another music startup, Lala.
Warner Music Group, an investor in both imeem and Lala, thinks they are no longer worth much, if anything at all. It wrote down its entire investment in imeem and half of its investment in Lala in the most recent quarter. As detailed in its 10Q report filed with the SEC, it took a $16 million charge to write down its investment in imeem, and an $11 million charge to write down part of its investment in Lala, plus it took another $4 million charge to write down a bad debt from imeem which it never expects to collect. That comes to a total of $33 million down the digital music drain. → Read More
I’ve been tracking the progress of Vienna, Austria-based music startup tunesBag for a while now. It’s essentially a social music player that can best be compared to the likes of Lala, imeem and Anywhere.fm in the sense that it allows you to upload your entire MP3 collection, stream it from anywhere over the Internet and share it with your friends. It’s completely free and claims to be perfectly legal under Austrian law, which I’m not sure will be enough of a shield against sue-happy music labels should it become popular.
TunesBag doesn’t bring anything truly innovative to the table, but it’s always nice to know there are alternatives available, and tunesBag is a strong contender that too often remains under the radar, even if you need an invite code to get in for now.
Today, the company is hoping to change that with the release of an Adobe AIR-powered application (hence available for Windows, Mac and Linux) that brings some of its goodness to the desktop. You’ll still need an invitation code to access the service for now, but hopefully they will open up to the masses soon. Update: TunesBag came through with 500 invites. Sign up here or use the code TECHCRUNCH. → Read More
Tonight music-streaming service Lala will be rolling out a number of improvements to its homepage and integrated music player. While the site has had a clean feel since its relaunch last October, it has also been a bit spartan – users had to navigate to various links to find their playlists and songs, and while it looked good it wasn’t as functional as it could have been.
The redesign builds on the site’s persistent music player, which sits at the top of the browser window no matter where on Lala’s site they go. Users can now view a pulldown-menu with a list of songs, and there’s a similar pull down menu for playlists.
Another new addition is the ‘Mix’ button, which allows users to generate a list of similar songs to the one they’re current playing (it is similar to the Genius feature found on iTunes). The feature is great for exploring new songs, allowing users to get exposure to a variety of music they haven’t heard while still retaining control over what they’d like to hear next (radio services like Pandora, while great for discovery, can still be frustrating because they only allow users to skip a limited number of songs). → Read More
Online music may be a treacherous space right now, but there are still a handful of music startups that may be coming close to getting it right. One of our favorites is Lala, a streaming music site that allows users to put their digital music library in the cloud, which can then be accessed from any computer. And soon, they’ll be able to access every song they own from their iPhones too, without having to worry about storage capacity or syncing.
Unlike music sites like MySpace Music, which largely revolve around playlists and streaming individual albums, Lala is meant to serve as a web-based music library. The site has forged unique deals with every major record label (and many indies too) that allows users to populate their online library with the music they already have on their computer (legally acquired or otherwise). Users simply install the Lala Helper app, scan their computer for music files, and sign into Lala to find their entire music library in the cloud. → Read More
Facebook’s ongoing effort to launch a free streaming music service is stalled, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. The company was close to a deal that would bring free streaming music from three of the four big labels (Universal, Sony, EMI) through the Total Music joint venture. But the deal stalled when the lone holdout, Warner Music, refused to participate.
Through most of 2008 Facebook said on and off record that they had no real interest in their own music application and that third parties like iLike could continue to build their Facebook music applications without fear of competition directly from Facebook.
News leaked in the Fall, though, that Facebook had approached a number of third parties to power the official Facebook music application: → Read More
MOG demo’d the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far.
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.
All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009. → Read More
Music streaming service Project Playlist has 40 million users if you believe their home page, or around 10 million if you go by Comscore unique monthly visitors. Either way, it’s a lot. They’ve got a hot new CEO, raised a big round of financing, and finally signed a deal with a big label.
But they’re also in a very vulnerable position right now. Litigation with the other three labels continues, and they’ve been banned from both MySpace and Facebook after those labels threatened to sue them, too. Embedding music playlists on social networks is the key to Project Playlist’s continued growth, and that door has been closed.
And Project Playlist’s competitors have certainly noticed. → Read More
LaLa doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the other streaming music services, probably because they actually charge users to listen to music. Sites like MySpace Music, Imeem and Last.fm all stream music for free these days. But LaLa only lets you listen to a song once. After that, you have to “buy” it for ten cents to listen to it as many times as you like, and add it to playlists.
Seems like a non-starter, right? But wait, there are a few reasons why LaLa has a real chance at success. First, they have an absolutely exceptional user experience, which was completely relaunched in October (and we loved it). Unlike all of the other services, LaLa gets you to the music you want to hear as quickly as possible, whether it’s through search, browsing or suggestions from friends. Creating and embedding playlists is dead simple, too (see below). The other services mentioned above take more steps to find music. Last.fm is the worst interface, it’s very hard for new users to figure it out. And both Imeem and MySpace Music have their issues too – too many clicks to get to music, and MySpace doesn’t allow embedding. → Read More
Call me a skeptic. When Lala came to our offices last week trying to convince me that music was heading to the cloud, and that they were going to help lead the transition, I wasn’t convinced at first. The company has floundered for years, moving from a CD swapping service to a failed music hub that shut down last summer. But now they’ve completely redesigned and are coming back with an advertising-free music site that makes me think that they might be onto something big here.
At first glance, Lala resembles most other music stores. You use a search box to find your favorite artists, and can buy DRM-free music for around 90 cents (there is some slight variation depending on the song). Each page features an artist profile, their albums, and playlists that other users have included them on. It’s standard fare, and while the DRM-free music is nice, it would have a tough time competing with Amazon on its own.
Fortunately Lala’s real potential stems from its integrated media player and your web library (which looks a lot like iTunes, but in the cloud). At the top of the screen is a music player that will continue playing whatever song you listen to, no matter where you navigate on the site. And you’ll have lots of content to play: users will be able to play any song on the site’s massive catalog in its entirety exactly one time free of charge. → Read More
The music industry’s attempts to create its own digital distribution business is like a bad horror movie. It just keeps coming back no matter how badly bludgeoned it gets. Back in 2001 in response to Napster, the music labels launched two competing music download sites, PressPlay and MusicNet (the latter became a white-label music service called MediaNet. Meanwhile, Pressplay was bought by Roxio, and formed the basis for the current version of Napster). Both were utter failures. Then in 2007, in response to iTunes, Doug Morris at Universal Music had the brilliant idea of bundling music subscriptions into the price of digital music players. The effort was called TotalMusic, and the idea was to get all the record labels on board, until the Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation that killed the idea. Or so everyone thought. Multiple sources in the Web music industry (including two CEOs and another executive) have told us that the music labels are mulling over another attempt at creating their own digital distribution business, or at least one they can control. Details are sketchy, but the buzz is increasing around a project to create a free, advertising-supported streaming service that would be licensed or white-labeled to other Websites. Each stream would link directly to a paid digital download. Some believe that a revived TotalMusic and this project are one and the same. TotalMusic, Like, Totally Doesn’t Want To Die Indeed, TotalMusic lives on, although in a different form. A search on LinkedIn for “TotalMusic” returns four people who list it as their current employer (Ted Ferguson, Troy Denkinger, Robert Broome, and Derek Reeve). All four live in Chicago and all four previously worked at MusicNow, another music service that changed hands between Circuit City, AOL, and ultimately the new Napster (not a good omen). A couple job listings, like this one posted on July 15 for a senior software engineer, describes TotalMusic as being based in Herndon, VA (near AOL old headquarters): TotalMusic, LLC is a new digital music platform offering the integration of music discovery, streaming and downloads into a wide variety of online and mobile environments. We have solid financial backing and a staff with decades of combined experience in online music. Compensation is competitive, and the work environment is highly distributed with most members of the team telecommuting, however, our Headquarters is located in Northern Virginia, and have a group in → Read More
Just launched: LaLa is offering users the ability to listen to an unlimited amount of on-demand streaming music, for free, marking the first time this has been available legally. Their new tag line is “Play albums on demand, buy the ones you love.” We wrote about this product a week ago, although the final launch product has additional features we did not cover in that post. The service is available here. The company is pursuing music licensing deals with labels and will make music available as those deals are closed. Warner Music is their first partner, and will make their full digital catalog available. The new LaLa is aimed squarely at iTunes. Users can listen to full songs as often as they like. They can buy the physical CD with a couple of clicks, or they can (in a week or so) download the song. The songs are DRM-free, but are downloaded directly to the iPod. The only way for a user to then remove them is to hack the iPod. So while the songs do not contain DRM, the user is effectively barred from consuming the song cross-platform. The company says that future versions of the service will allow CD burning as well. Prices for song downloads will be $0.99, the company says, but will vary for high-use users. If you listen to a lot of music on LaLa and participate in the community, song prices will be lower. The digital tracks will be watermarked .aac files. They won’t stop you from transferring the songs to friends iPods, but the service will only allow one licensed copy of that watermarked file to work on Lala at a time. The service launch is part of huge bet Lala is making on the future of online music. Licensing fees alone are expected to cost the company $140 million over the next two years. They’ll need an average revenue of $65 per user per year to cover the cost. But Lala sees the new service as an essential update to the way we experience and purchase music. Lala’s bet is based on two beliefs: people want to own their music, and they want to sample it in the most interactive way possible. They saw the radio’s passive sampling experience evolving into Napster’s on demand experience. But Napster was illegal, and didn’t let you easily sync music where you wanted it. Lala’s new → Read More
LaLa is making a very big bet on its business – it will offer users something they’ve never had (legally) before: free, legal, on demand streaming music. LaLa already runs a cd swapping service and recently started to let users listen to live concerts on the site. Now they are going to let users listen to on demand music on the site in addition to its other services. There are a number of paid services that do this already, and a handful of flat out illegal ones as well. This is an extremely expensive business – unlike services like Pandora that have to pay only a fraction of a cent when they play a song (and it still hurts them), on demand streaming rates are more like $0.01 per song. That works out to an average of $0.17/user/hour, and there is no way to cover those costs with advertising alone. It’s also much more difficult to work through the legal mess to offer this kind of service. Unlike Internet radio, which is covered by the DMCA and which has rates set by regulation, there are no laws to cover on demand streaming. LaLa must negotiate directly with the big labels. The one-cent per song I mentioned above is an estimate by an industry insider of what Yahoo and others pay. Labels can charge more or less than this, and they also like to get a minimum fee per listener/month of around $6. Unless LaLa puts listening restrictions in place, heavy users will go way beyond that. Our understanding is that the labels will also only negotiate one year deals, and if they see any profit on the table at the end of the term they will grab for more. So how will LaLa cover its costs? The company says they are going to sell CDs to users. Like a song? Click a button and get it sent to you. They say that if they can get each user to buy one CD per month on average they will break even. That may be true, but the average music buyer in the U.S. buys two CDs per year. So LaLa will have to get heavy music buyers to the site to move that average up. The company has been working on this for some time and is reportedly still in negotiations with labels to get the rights to music. Last year → Read More
Lala.com, the $1 CD swap service, has added another feature to their music community site, live and recorded concert casts. The concert casts can only be listened through an embedded player on Lala. Each cast is made by specific partnerships with bands and the venues they play. The first such concert was Aimee Mann’s Holiday Show on December 13th at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco CA, USA. The recorded version is available through the front page of their site or here. The comedy of “Best Week Ever”‘s Paul F. Tompkins and spontaneity of a live show really make it an entertaining listen. The next live show will be a concert by Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell and the Werewolves in a benefit concert for Bay Area kids music programs. In the coming months they will be incorporating more venues and bands and a networking of sound booths across the country to make live recordings for recently acquired WOXY. The free live shows are a great addition to the site and join their other four offerings: terrestrial radio, citizen radio, music swapping, and new music sales. The backbone of their site still remains CD swapping, though. For a deeper description of the service see our previous coverage. Their internal numbers indicate they have 300,000 registered users and conduct 12,000 CD trades a day, with 30% of their revenues consisting of new music sales, and are cash-flow positive. We had originally likened Lala to Peerflix. However, Lala differs from the movie swap site in that they have gone to great lengths to not only be a marketplace but to also build a community around enjoying music, similar to the way Yelp has built a community around reviews. Along this line of thought, Lala’s John Kuch says their goal is to “democratize the discovery and distribution of music by putting it in the hands of the people”. The sentiment is that experiencing and interacting with music is key to people’s purchasing habits. They struck out on this path in several ways, incorporating social networking features into the account, bringing terrestrial radio to the internet (mostly independent radio and their crown jewel WOXY), and finally allowing an expanding group of beta users to create their own radio stations. To start streaming user generated “citizen” radio stations, Lala had to jump through several legal hoops left over from the days of terrestrial radio and → Read More
In a bizarre amalgamation of virtual and physical business, the dying independent terrestrial turned internet radio station WOXY is being revived by online CD swapping service Lala. Lala is tangible evidence that online music doesn’t have to kill the CD industry. At first I was skeptical, but after spending more time on the site I think this radio strategy is very smart. See also our previous coverage of the company here. Lala users identify CDs they want mailed to them for $1 plus 75 cents shipping. Other users who have those CDs available for swapping are notified and put them in the mail. Lala keeps the dollar and donates a portion of it (as much as $50k in a month so far) to a Foundation that supports artists. Users can also chose to purchase CDs for immediate delivery. Now the company is taking over WOXY to allow users to create streaming radio stations that will in turn inspire CD swapping and purchases. Station listeners can click to request a swapped or purchased CD that a streaming track originates from. The music available for creating the radio stations is licensed from a third party. Lala plans to invest between $5 and $10 million into the station. The company received $9 million in funding from Bain and Ignition last year. It appears that Lala is quickly gaining traction with users. The company reports about 10,000 CD swapping transactions per day. Comments left on the site appear in numbers that many publishers would be envious of. The company says CD sales have been doubling monthly and hit gross margin profitability last month. Only 2% of CD swapping transactions result in complaint reports and users are rated in a karma system. Perhaps the strangest thing about Lala is a delusional, yet legally required, request that participants delete digital copies of music from the CDs they mail away in swaps. I’d be curious to see how often that happens. Internet radio licenses open a number of interesting, if legally tricky, possibilities like this. See also Faces.com, (our coverage) an Australia based social network that combines user playlists, online music sales and an internet radio license. (Disclosure: Faces is a TechCrunch sponsor.) See also our coverage of Swaptree if trading physical objects is your thing. I think I like Lala, though the integration of CD swapping, music purchase, internet radio and DRM compliance is taking a → Read More
Palo Alto based lala made a splash by announcing their landing page on USA Today. Lala is a new service, set to launch this summer, that allows people to swap physical CDs. It looks to be exactly like Peerflix but for CDs. You will tell lala what music you have. Other members can request it from you, and you send it directly to them using a postage-prepaid envelope supplied by lala. They charge $1 for the swap, and $.20 goes directly to artists. You aren’t supposed to send copies of CDs (originals only), and lala asks that you do the “right thing” and remove songs from your iPod or PC once you’ve sent a CD to another member. While I’m all for the revenue sharing with artists, pleeeease, lala, get over yourself and drop the condescending, do-the-right-thing-as-defined-by-the-RIAA messaging. I have never written about Peerflix – I am a former member and was deluged in spam from the service and never found anything good on the site to request (people keep the good stuff and put little known movies into the service). My hope for lala is that they get much better inventory from users and don’t try to enforce the “no copies” rule too strongly. These will be very difficult things to do. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
