The Death of Lala

This is the last week in the life of Lala.com, the music listening service that began as a site for music listeners to swap compact discs. Unfortunately if this is the first time you've heard of the site, you cannot try it out because they've shutdown the site to new users, but I hope that I can illuminate why losing Lala is such a big blow to music fans. When the site was purchased by Apple in December 2009 it didn't resemble its origins much, but had evolved into one of the best and most useful sites for perusing new music and discovering bands. Sounds like MySpace right? Wasn't that supposed to be their strength? Lala exceeded MySpace in a number of key ways.

Lala was designed beautifully. On MySpace everyone has the ability to create their own page design, which is empowering from a creativity point of view, but terrible from a user interface point of view. Lala was practically the definition of Web 2.0 design. Big friendly buttons, lots of open space, and predictably functional. Lala was also able to keep its focus on music and people who enjoy music. While MySpace began as a site for indie bands and fans to mingle and network it quickly lost that focus as it grew from a startup that was purchased by Rupert Murdoch and his business conglomerate. It went largely from a social network focused around music to largely a social networking for finding people to hook up with. As Jerry Seinfield would say, "Not that there's anything wrong with that!", but it wasn't what and other serious music fans had hoped for.

Lala never lost that focus of being a social network that was absolutely focused on music and only music. When you went to a user's profile you got very little info about the person that wasn't music related. This was refreshing. Instead you greeted with which artists your friends were listening to most, and which albums they were hooked on recently. Best of all the user didn't have to post this information, Lala calculated the info for you simply your usage of their site. For a generation of music listeners that increasingly wants to share information freely, it was revealing to see that perhaps you weren't actually listening to some artists as much as you thought you were. It could be embarrassing when you discovered that you were listening to a whole lot more pop music than you thought you were. It could also be refreshing to learn that you were not the only fan of that indie band down the street. You might say, but what about Last.fm? Don't they also offer all that stuff?

Last.fm has a whole host of problems that have plagued it for years. Chief among them, is the inability or the lack of desire by Last.fm or their CBS owners to give possession of a band's name space to one group only. This often leads to a lot of confusion when that band you thought was an electronic group from the U.S. is confused with that death metal act from Slovakia. It is also not helpful when the last.fm algorithm offers to find more music just like this for you and you end up with a mish mash that doesn't flow well from one song to the next. On the other hand, Lala made the right decision by partnering up with services like CDBaby in the United States and allowing those artists willing to invest some of their own money in their career to take the first crack at the name space on their site. In June of 2009, this was how I discovered the Lala.com. Lala's partnership with CDBaby resulted in our music being placed on their site, and a music listening romance was born.

CDBaby has partnered with many digital distributors like Lala over the years, including the behemoths iTunes and the Amazon mp3 store. Whenever a new partnership is revealed I make it a habit to investigate the new service and try to figure out how this service is different from the others. What does this site offer to the music geek that the last one did not. Not merely for business purposes, for leveraging, marketing and what not, but what makes this site special and unique from another on the web. One thing that Lala offered was that it was miles and away better than any other site that could allow you to mirror your iTunes collection on the web for free. This was extremely helpful for a writer with a library that consisted of thousands upon thousands of tracks who wanted to carry his music collection around with him, but who had an iPod that was running low on battery power. I cannot count the number of times I wrote drafts for various things using the Lala service in the background while at the public library, college library, or even at the random cyber cafe.

I'd be a fool not to mention that Lala allowed you to listen to music you had never heard before all the way through for free, for the first time. As a musician myself, I know that some of the greatest music I've ever enjoyed is not always about following the rules of implementing your hook within the first 30 seconds of a song, nor do you always ruin a beautifully complex work by trying to create that hook driven 30 seconds that can be sampled for preview by services such as Amazon, or iTunes. Plus, Lala allowed you to add songs to your digital locker for a mere 10 cents. You couldn't download it, but you could stream as many times as you liked from the website for that cheap price. I was really stoked that artists were compensated. It bothers me that artists who may not be able to go on tour due to health or financial reasons has to sacrifice money by placing all of their work online for free. I was happy to give the artist something for making their work available. After all, I liked it enough to add it to my digital locker! Why should I mind paying a measly 10 cents for the being able to listen to it thousands of times? It wasn't too long ago that I was willing to give up 25 cents in a pizza parlor to hear the jukebox play that Led Zeppelin track one more time. Plus, for typically an additional 79 cents (still less than iTunes and Amazon mind you) you could add the song to your iTunes collection which made it possible to sync it to your iPod, iPhone, or iPad forever. You could say I was pretty stoked.

Lala also had predictive algorithms like their competitor Pandora that could find other artists and songs you might enjoy that are similar in some way to the song or track you just listened to. These were often quite accurate, and brought you into contact with not only wonderful bands, but even more rewarding people that you actually wanted to know behind the profiles that also enjoyed the same strange assortment of bands that you did. It was through people such as these that I discovered the joy of Goldfrapp, Crystal Castles, Metro Station, Bat For Lashes, Kenna, Black Kids, Ladyhawke, and Empire of the Sun. That is not to say that I could not have discovered these great artists through other services, I just hadn't discovered them through those sites very easily when I had been using them regularly.

So Lala is scheduled to close on May 31st. My birthday no less. Happy Birthday, eh? In short, Lala you will be missed. I truly hope that Apple hasn't shut you down because they considered you a threat to their business, but rather because they recognize the innovation that you created and truly I hope that they want to implement it in their own version of iTunes.com in the not too distant future.