The Right Way

In our previous article, we wrote about the strong demand for peer to peer file sharing, and one of the technologies which may finally reconcile legitimate supply with that demand is cloud computing (centralized content). By licensing access to media content rather than distributing the content on physical media or in data files, content providers can provide very convenient access to what they have and really cut down on distribution costs. Everybody wins, right?

Well, not quite yet. Lala.com showed (and maybe still shows) great promise as the perfect combination of social networking, digital music, and software as a service. In theory, users can host all of their music online where it’s available at any computer with internet access. Backups aren’t needed because Lala stores all of the songs on its servers, and Lala allows its users to transfer their existing music collection to their Lala account. When Lala doesn’t already have a particular song in its database, it allows users to upload the MP3 from their computer.

And while that all sounds great, Lala’s implementation and service have been lackluster at best. We know the future lies in cloud computing, and when Chrome OS and similar platforms hit the market, we expect the demand for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like this to skyrocket. So we’ve been trying Lala – which is ostensibly the best solution yet in its category – for the past few months to give an honest evaluation. So here’s what we think…

Availability. We haven’t noticed that much downtime with the Lala website or the servers which stream the music, but even while the rest of the site and content is working fine, many of the songs which we uploaded (songs which were not in their database) are no longer playable. This is the single biggest problem we have with Lala – they have little respect for the music of an individual user, and they clearly prioritize the music that they already have in their database.

The Player. The web interface for viewing a user’s music library and playing songs is miles above any other web-based player we’ve seen. The fact that the interface is minimal and simplistic turns out to be a plus because playing music shouldn’t be complicated, and we didn’t end up missing any of the advanced features that Winamp or Rhythmbox might have offered. There is certainly room to improve though, and we would have liked better, more convenient search functionality. Editing tags for songs in our library was a breeze, and it’s much easier and faster editing “web songs” than it is for MP3s on a hard drive.

Reliability. Lala’s player uses Adobe Flash and overall works well, but it has some serious bugs. After having the browser open for a long while (maybe a day or so), the player stops playing sound. It continues to buffer songs, but it just never starts playing. Oddly enough, we saw this error happen very consistently on both Windows and Ubuntu in both Firefox and Chrome. We were only able to pinpoint the problem because Chrome allows us to unload the flash plugin in its Task Manager (a subsequent refresh would reload it and allow the player to start working).

Support. Naturally after encountering all of these problems we tried to contact support. Lala asks its users to fill out a form on their site and wait for their support staff to respond. Well, we haven’t heard anything yet – no emails, no ticket numbers, nada. This is hardly the kind of service that would inspire anyone to trust them with their entire music collection.

Price. In this area, we have nothing but great things to say about the Lala experience. Buying the right to listen to a song on Lala costs only 10 cents. The prices for downloading full MP3s are also very reasonable, but buying an entire album of web songs only costs a little more than a dollar. This is really the way music buying should be, and this is what we loved about Lala’s offering.

The Future for Lala. Overall, Lala is a great idea that just hasn’t fully materialized yet. There had previously been a lot of speculation about an iPhone app and whether the authoritarians over at Apple would approve it, but earlier this month Apple acquired Lala for $85 million (according to the WSJ). It’s still unclear how Lala will fit into the larger Apple picture, and it’s likely that Lala may be absorbed by – or at least merged with – iTunes.

The one good thing about this acquisition is that Apple must now honor the purchases made by Lala’s users. If Lala had gone under, then its users would have lost the money they invested in their online collection. And who knows, Google was rumored to have been bidding for Lala, and they may still be looking to create their own music streaming service. Unlike their multitude of other products which have nothing to do with their business model, organizing the world’s music (alongside targeted ads of course) sounds like a good fit.