What started as a CD-swapping service back in the day, has become an online repository for your music – allowing you to have access to your music on any computer connected to the internet. In an struggle to stay relevant, the people behind Lala made a good investment in the future, a cloud music service.

Stay Relevant

Times are changing as we rapidly move to an increasingly connected world. Companies everywhere are doing their best to stay relevant. But not all succeed.

I can imagine a whiteboard – and the three core people standing around it in the meeting room. The question popped:

How can we stay relevant? It’s no longer about physical access to media – everything is connected to the internet.

It was a good question to ask because CD swapping wasn’t going to work forever. CD sales are going down quarter after quarter, as the RIAA keeps telling us. They blame piracy, we say it’s evolution. People are buying music online and that’s nothing new.

We need a music store. With a large catalog, about 6 million songs. And a social network.

But that was already done: iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Rhapsody, and the list goes on. The same goes for social networks, with Last.fm leading the pack. The only way to bring in people to your service is to provide a better experience, for less money.

Another trend widely discussed by tech pundits are netbooks, are selling like there’s no tomorrow: Most of the time people are on the internet, checking mail, reading, chatting even doing work on the road.

Can you notice what’s missing from that list? That’s when Lala was born:

Your music library online, available from any computer.

Moving to the Cloud

The Lala Music Mover comes as a free download once you sign up. It’s a small application that sits quietly in your taskbar and uploads your songs to Lala:

• Fast song matching reads the metadata from your songs, and matches it to Lala’s catalog. If Lala has the song it is automatically added to your online library, no questions asked. It doesn’t even matter if you downloaded the songs via P2P. It matched 1,947 songs in 53 minutes, with processor usage never jumping the 30% limit.
• Brute-Force uploads the songs it can’t find in Lala’s catalog to the server. This takes some time depending on the server load and your bandwidth.

Lala Music Mover works both on Mac and Windows – never crashed or sucked up all the CPU cycles. Settings like default download folder, downloading/uploading are clearly laid out.

Once you uploaded your library you can access it online and play it through the flash player. A nice touch, you also have access to your playlists.

You’ll notice however that ratings – which are stored in the proprietary .itl file in iTunes – are not imported.

Music Store and Social Network

• Clean interface, easy to navigate and find artists, songs.
• Recommendations based on what you and your friends are listening.
• Listen to whole albums/songs for free once. 10 cents for unlimited web-plays, 99 cents for DRM-free MP3 download. The web-play counts toward the mp3 purchase.
• Songs are encoded at 256 kbps VBR or 320 kbps CBR.

Conclusion

The only caveat I find to this service as a whole, is that it’s not available outside of the United States. Yes, the geo-ip tracking can be tricked, but I’m not sure how legal that is. We contacted John Kuch, but unfortunately he was out of the office and could only be available via phone. Hopefully we’ll get him on an interview after the holidays.

Considering the large 6 million song catalog, integration with media players, the high quality encoding and cloud availability, I would strongly recommend this service. Visit Lala.com.