Okay, this might get confusing and I really do apologize for my lack of writing skills on this one.

The way lala works is that they provide their entire music inventory for you to listen to anywhere over the web.  You can actually listen to an entire song of an album before you buy rather than those 30 second samples that I hate so much. I of course found this feature to be really cool.  Now, if you really like the song you can sign up, purchase it for 89 cents and download it on to your computer. Or if you don’t want to download it, but you really have to have it, you can just pay 10 cents and you can listen to it as much as you want and lala will store it for you.  All songs are DRM free and are in MP3 format.  It pretty much acts like a music library for you, but your music is living on the web and you can have access to it anywhere as long as you have internet service.

Another feature they offer is something called lala music mover. It’s lala software that you download on to your computer and what it does is scan your entire music library on your computer and matches it up with their music catalogs. All the songs that are matched up will now be playable through their service which you can listen to it anywhere on the web.  Oh, and if you have playlists through itunes, those playlists will be added as well. I noticed the Smart Playlists were not added but only the regular Playlists.  So I did this entire procedure and it took two hours for about 1800 song, but that’s only for the songs they have in their catalog. For the songs they don’t have, you can upload them if you wish.  It’s actually an automatic process that does it behind the scenes, but for me it’s going to take a total of 1day and 8 hours for  the 1,000+ songs they don’t have in their catalogs! For those songs they don’t have, I believe you can just manually pick the songs you want to upload.

Lala also has no advertising on their site which is pretty amazing in today’s web world and I really can’t figure out how they work that in their business model.  When you sign up, which is free by the way, you get 25 credits added to your account to purchase web songs. One credit buys you a web song. The web songs are the songs that you can add to your library, but aren’t down-loadable unless you want to purchase them for 79 cents more.

The other aspects of lala are like most other music websites like eMusic or even Pandora. You can create playlist, queue songs, share music with friends through twitter or facebook, browse music, and lala also gives recommendations. One thing I found out is that you can embed a playlist or a song into a blog. Like this.

This is going to be so much easier for me to share music, instead of uploading a song or trying to find it on the web. Awesome.

Well I hope I was able to bring something new for you to explore and if not please feel free to add some helpful tips or suggestions.

Update: For some reason the music player does not work in Firefox 3, but does work in Safari. I emailed lala’s tech support to let them know about the bug. Hopefully this will get fixed soon. My apologies.

On Sunday I decided to take a chance on another site other than Itunes or Amazon Music for my music downloads. I did some research and decided on eMusic.  I realized that Itunes wasn’t cutting it for me. What I needed was a site that I can pay a monthly fee for whatever price and get a certain amount of downloads.  Emusic is the place to do that.

The biggest problem with Itunes for me was the amount of music I like to download.  I was paying like $9.99 an album for usually about 10 songs. The way I spend money on downloads; I knew it was going to add up in the long run. Another problem I found with Itunes was the scenario of me constantly converting my purchased Itune songs to MP3s. I guess I’m still old school and I like making mix CDs for my car. With eMusic.com and even Amazon, all the songs are MP3s and are DRM free. Itunes still has DRM music on their library.

Emusic has several subscription plans to choose from. They have month to month and they also have annual plans as well. The one I chose was the bottom tier eMusic basic for 11.99 a month. This plan is a limit of 30 songs a month, but when you first sign up they give you an additional 50 extra songs (Booyah). So like a kid in a candy store, I went freaking ballistic. I couldn’t stop myself. I had a list of all the albums I wanted to get, but couldn’t, because I just didn’t feel right in buying that much music on Itunes.

I have to say that eMusic may not be right for everyone. First off, eMusic is more of an independent music supplier. If you’re looking for more mainstream music like oh, Britney Spears, then you’re not going to find it. Hell, they don’t even have New Order. As matter of fact they steer away from most mainstream labels to keep the prices down. Another important tidbit is that unused songs do not carry over to the next month (I guess it’s not like unused minutes), so it’s important to get your money’s worth and make sure to download to your limit. If you’re interested in eMusic, but don’t know for sure, you can type in several band names in the search bar and see if they come up. If they have your type or taste in music, then enjoy.

Well, I still have 26 more songs to go for the month…