I got an email telling me that the music service Lala.com is being shut down as of May 31st. If you'll notice the convenient music player I have in the upper left hand corner of you're screen, which makes listening to music while reading possible on my lovely blog, that's from Lala. I was advised to check out the site this past November, and I was pretty impressed with the site. If you're not familiar with the service, basically, you can stream any song in the world (at least the ones they have the rights to) one time, no matter what. If you want to stream it again, you pay 10 cents to be able to stream it unlimitedly. You can listen to your library from any computer, but you can't take it with you on a CD or MP3 player, but that's okay if you listen to music on your computer anyway. I often times just use a computer to play songs, so the service was a very cost-effective way for me to hear new and notable music for free, or for a very low price. If i haven't mentioned it before, which I believe I have, I do not steal music as of early 2008. This site gave me a easy way to hear/preview music before deciding if I wanted to purchase it in another form in the future. I'd buy the web album for like, a dollar, stream the hell out of it, and if I like it, I'll buy it for real on iTunes or buy the CD from a store. Examples of music I bought on Lala and then bought again in another format in the near future are The Swellers, Thrice, and fun.. There is a lot of great music out there and it is also expensive to collect. I will miss Lala very much when it is gone. In the mean time, I'm going to use the hell out of the site so that when it's gone, I will have a better idea of what I will procure in another format, weather it's on iTunes, or CD from my local record shop.
When I heard that Apple had bought the service a while back, I was wondering if they would shut it down, or let it be. I was hoping they would just let it be and reap the rewards, albeit much smaller rewards. iTunes makes bank on 99 cent and dollar twenty-nine tracks. I'm no math whiz, but I believe ten cent tracks, is less money coming in. This doesn't surprise me that they're shutting it down, but nonetheless it's disappointing. They are at least being kind enough to give me iTunes store credit for my purchases on Lala, which from what my mathematical brain tells me is about $15, so now I will just have to figure out which music I have in my Lala collection I want to own from iTunes. It'll still be a fraction of the music I was able to buy on Lala, but it's better than nothing. The thing that really sucks about this is that I can't change my song on my blog now, because that option has been disabled...so you're stuck with Circa Survive for a while. Good song, though!
Total bummer, this is.
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