Sorry to use such a terrible, terrible song title as a post title, but I couldn't resist!
I have finally found a tool, that I think you will find very useful if you are ever in a jam where your entire music library is necessary and you’re iPod isn’t handy, it is.... wait for it.... Lala! That's right, it's actually called Lala. Lala is a sort of variation/rip-off of my beloved last.fm; it's a music website/sort of database you may say combined with social networking. It's a bit different from last.fm in the sense that you have a web library of music accessible from any computer, which is pretty cool. You also start out with 50 free song credits for your web library, and any web purchases after that are only 10 cents. Full mp3s cost 89 cents, but if you already purchased them for your web library they cost 79 cents. Confused? Don’t worry, there will be an instructional video later!
For now, more about the origins of Lala…
When Lala was originally launched in 2005 by founder, Bill Nguyen, it was a CD trading website, where users could exchange used or new CDs with one another for only $1 (and ship it for another 75¢). As a crazy OCD music collector, I think that a CD trading website is still a pretty cool idea, but alas, Lala had to adapt to the Web 2.0 world if they wanted to survive, and adapt they did! Nguyen and his team were able to turn Lala into the super-cool music streaming-sharing-buying-downloading-uploading-networking site you now know today!
I don’t know exactly how “useful” this tool may be in your every day life other than a cool time-waster. It’s not gonna help you get a job, make a survey, find your soul mate, or tell you how to cure the chicken pox, but it will make access to your library super-easy! And really is there anything more you need in life then constant access to great music? I think not.
Right now, Lala is up against some pretty great streaming programs: last.fm, Pandora, Imeem, and I’m sure there are many more out there that are just as good but now as well known. All of them have their pros; Pandora has science on its side, and last.fm is great for those who like statistics, networking, and planning out what concerts to go to, but Lala is the only one in the bunch to offer the option of uploading your entire music library, which is probably the best featured offered out of all of them, unless you prefer to just stick to Internet radio…
What’s great about all of these services is that they can be used by anyone who likes music, even you! Whether you are young, old, indie, mainstream, near, far, wherever you are you can use any of these awesome music services. Kind of like how anyone can use Youtube; my dad can’t open an email attachment to save his life, but, god love him, he can find a video of his favorite mariachi song on Youtube!
Back to Lala…
Lala actually gets pretty decent reviews; PC mag has a pretty good one that you can read here. But it has yet to catch on and become as popular as Pandora or last.fm. In order to get the full experience of Lala and check things out for myself, I signed up for an account. It was pretty easy, and after you sign up you can download an application to "upload" your existing library (mine was in iTunes) called the Lala music mover. The music mover looks up songs in your library that also exist in their vast online library (over 6 million songs) and uploads them into your Lala "collection," they work the same way that any other web song you could buy with your credits would. It's pretty cool, but not without it's faults. I have over 10 thousand songs in my iTunes library, so it estimated about 10 hours over uploading. Naturally, I left it to upload over night, but it errored after about 7,000 or so songs and I'm too lazy to upload the remaining 3,000...
But access to 7,000 streaming songs online (and all of my iTunes playlists) is still pretty cool! It's really convenient because my library is stored on my external hard drive, which I obviously cannot carry around with me all the time; so when I'm at work or outside on my laptop, I can still listen to my music! Also loading songs takes only seconds! And you can make a sort of Netflix queue of the songs you want to listen to, which is really awesome, if you are an obsessive-compulsive like me!
Anyone who likes to listen to music can use this tool, it's super easy to use and convenient. I might even keep my account for a while!
Why Lala?
I know what you’re thinking (I can’t help it, I’m a little bit psychic), “Lala is super-cool and everything, but why should I use it when I can just as easily carry around my iPod and listen to a playlist on that?” I understand, I wasn’t into all the hoopla at first either, but then my iPod died (there was a terrible accident with a bottle of Gatorade; I can’t really talk about it right now, it’s still so fresh in my mind and my iPod was sooo young…) and I, like a lot of other people out there, no longer had my entire music library in my back pocket. I was stuck at work staring at a boring computer screen with a pair of headphones that were not plugged into anything. And then it hit me…Lala! All I had to do was log in and all my music magically appeared!
It really was that easy! From creating the account, using the music mover, and streaming my “collection” on the website, everything is really simple and the interface is so easy, I bet even my dad (see previous post) could navigate it! (For a how-to video tutorial see the following post).
Now Lala doesn’t serve any sort of professional function that will construct buildings, solve math problems, or compose music; but it’s very useful for us Web 2.0-music-lovers who often find ourselves in music emergencies! What if you’re at a party and they do not have the new Passion Pit song on the playlist?!!! Just log onto Lala and there it is! Crisis averted, you just saved the party!
There aren’t a whole lot of reviews on the new Lala (I could find plenty on the old Lala, which specialized in CD trading), but on the website’s home page there is a new “user review” or quote every few seconds. Here are some of the “reviews” I saw:
“This is probably the most amazing site I’ve ever stumbled across”
“This site is incredible - from the interface to the depth of controls and options”
“24 hours into it and lala is already one of my favorite websites”
There is also an interesting website profile, that analyzes the amount of visitors and traffic here.
One thing that I found a little frustrating about Lala is that it is hard to find other users or see how many people are using the service on the website. A great feature for this site would be some sort of music compatibility scale based on taste or songs listened to, so that users could connect with each other and recommend music to one another. Hopefully future versions will remedy this problem.
If Lala can have the social networking characteristics of last.fm and maybe add their super cool scrobbling tool as well ( ; they can become one of the top streaming sites out there. There is nothing out there to stop it, it will allow people to have access to their music no matter where in the world they are! No other music service out there offers that!
Lala in Action!!!
What goes better with music than a visual? Helloooo music videos....
Here's a little tutorial of what Lala is, its origins, and how it works.
I know it's a little confusing to just read about a tool, especially a Web 2.0 application, and although Power Points are now frowned upon, I think this will help explain/show you how cool Lala actually is.
Here is a power point explaining the magical tool we know as...Lala:
Lala Presentation
View more presentations from radiohead340.
And here is a video-tutorial I made if you're more of an audio/visual learner ( ;
This video shows you how to access your collection, play songs, view profiles, and purchase songs using your web credits.
It's what's supposed to be on slide #10 in the power point (but it would not upload properly). I hope you enjoy the song choices!
Make sure to set your browser to full screen when you watch it to get the full effect!
lala preview video copy
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