LaLa.com and the First Lesson Learned about Cloud Services

Back in July of last year I wrote an article praising the music networking site, Lala.com. My review of the site was a “goodbye” to the iTunes Music Store and a “hello” to web song purchases on Lala. Even though it’s easy these days to listen to Internet radio programs for free or use services like Pandora for a more selective listening experience, I liked Lala because I could purchase streaming web songs (.10 cents/song) and web albums for under $1.50 and listen to them as much as I wanted.

Accessing my web songs on a cloud service was also cool because it meant not having to add more mp3s to my bulging iTunes Library. I felt confident that Lala.com would be around for a long while. I equally liked how Lala.com was also social a social networking site. Every week I would get awesome recommendations from other Lala members about the type of music I listened to.

Everything on Lala was like a new and good relationship until girlfriend sent out a letter saying the relationship was ending at the end of this month.

The closing of Lala is a direct result of Apple purchasing the company back in December, which was a major surprise to Apple followers and fortune tellers—for none of them saw it coming. In fact from my reading, most Apple sites had not even talked about Lala.com before the Apple acquisition. Lala.com itself hadn’t gained much traction on the Internet, though it seemed to have a loyal membership of people like me who appreciated the very affordable web songs, and the ability to upload your own mp3s to your Lala account.

But in the typical secretive approach that Apple takes about nearly all its product and service announcements, nothing has been communicated about what it plans to do with Lala.com. Is it building an iTunes.com to include web song or is it just making sure that web song services never compete with their precious iTunes song market? Who knows!

Lala.com was not forthcoming about future plans either. All it said was that its members will be given credit for web songs that could be used for purchases on the Apple‘s iTunes Store, and that downloads of Lala mp3 songs would continue to play as part of your local music library.

That’s it. Nothing else said. Not even an explication for the closing. For all we know, Bill Nguyen, the owner of Lala.com, could simply be taking his acquisition money and retiring. But I doubt it. I’m sulking at this point.

Though I predict Apple will establish some sort of iTunes.com cloud service, the closing of Lala.com makes me think twice about forking over money for other cloud-based services.

I’m wondering if cloud-bases services where you essentially don’t own media content but are renting it is a good business model for us as consumers? Shouldn’t we be able to take our purchased web tracks to another service?

Many of my Lala contacts have written to me about moving over to MOG.com, a similar streaming music and social networking service, except that it is subscription-based, unlike Lala (non-subscription), in which you could actually listen/preview entire tracks before purchasing.
 
I’m wanting hold out some and see what Apple actually does now that it has caused the closing of Lala. I access plenty of fresh music through the Internet radio software, Snowtape, which allows me to actually record and replay selected songs both on my Mac and my iPhones. But what it doesn’t do is deliver entire albums of music, which I typically like to buy.

Plus, even though Lala.com is giving its members credit for web songs purchased, that compensation won’t be enough to replace web songs and album purchases. I figure that for every ten web albums I purchased Lala will only be enough credit to purchase a single album download on iTunes. There are many albums on my Lala.com account that I want to continue listening to, but I’m not interested in paying for $9-$10 downloads, when web songs and albums are a more affordable way to listen to music.

So basically I’ve learned my first lesson about cloud-based media services, that content of those services can be taken away at any time. I’m not sure that’s the kind of relationship I want to get into again.