Lala Launches On-demand Free Streaming Music Service
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.
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 service promises a higher quality and more comprehensive service than has ever come before.