Do you LaLa?  If not, you have no idea what you’re missing!  Forget iTunes.  Cancel Rhapsody.  Delete your Pandora and Last.fm accounts.  From now on, your everything and your always lives in LaLa.com.


LaLa works like this:  You can listen to any of LaLa’s 6 million songs on the web one time for free.  You get to listen to the entire song and not just a 30 second preview.

Then, if you want to listen to the song again, you either pay 10 cents for unlimited web streaming, or you can download the entire song in non-DRM MP3 format for 89 cents.  You can also pay 10 cents first for streaming only and then later upgrade your song for download for an additional 79 cents. 

LaLa gives you 50 free songs you can add to your account for web streaming when you open an account.  Then you can add funds to your LaLa wallet using a credit card or PayPal.

The real genius of LaLa is in how it provides access to the music you already have on your computer.  You can upload your entire local iTunes library to LaLa using the “Music Mover” — and you then have access to all your local songs on the web so you can listen to them anywhere.  Your iTunes playlists and listen counts are also preserved on LaLa.

DRM-protected songs are not uploaded to LaLa and they appear as skipped songs.  The “errors found” is the DRM encoding.

It took about 10 hours to upload all my music to LaLa, but it was worth it. 

Now I can listen to my music library anywhere I wish.  If I buy an MP3 from LaLa, I can download the song and LaLa will add it to my iTunes library for me.

The LaLa homepage interface shows you what others are listening to and downloading.

You can also get a quick peek at the top songs on LaLa. 

Hovering over an album cover provides a clickable list of all the songs on the album. 

LaLa also lets you protect your privacy.

You can play on LaLa and be completely invisible. 

You won’t get any recommendations on songs you might like from other like-minded LaLa-ers, but if keeping to yourself is important, then LaLa makes your privacy a prime directive you can invoke at any time.

I’ve been online with LaLa for three days now, and I’m loving LaLa even more than the first day because the song catalog is huge and the streaming sound quality is incredible. 

When I can find more than one version of Joe Raposo’s brilliant song — “You Will Be My Music” — I know I’m in the right place. 

I realize LaLa is eating up my bandwidth limits by the hour, but the love of LaLa is a passion no man can resist.

12 Comments

  1. ANNE – I live and teach on the upper West Coast of the United States. My interests are Philosophy, English, and Social Communication.
    ANNE says:

    I like iTunes a lot but they don’t have a subscription service. I guess this isn’t like that, though, right? Sure seems easy. I’ll have to go sign up and see what’s up.

  2. David Boles – New York City – David Boles was born in Nebraska and holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher who writes across the live stage, print, radio, television, film, and the web. With more than 50 books in print, David continues to write 2MM words a year and has authored over 25K articles. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, and founded The United Stage advocacy platform on the principle that playwrights have a duty to direct their own work. Read the Prairie Voice Archive at Boles.com | Buy his books at David Boles Books Writing & Publishing at BolesBooks.com | Study with Script Professor at ScriptProfessor.com | Touch American Sign Language mastery at Hardcore ASL at HardcoreASL.com | Explore the Human Meme podcast at HumanMeme.com | Train with Boles Bells at BolesBells.com.
    David W. Boles says:

    You’ll love LaLa, Anne. It is made for you. Right, there are no ongoing subscriptions costs like Rhapsody. LaLa is Mac-friendly — unlike Rhapsody — so getting your songs uploaded is really easy, as if finding music to stream. You pay as you go, and you can listen to all 6 million songs for free one time. Pretty neat business model. I like “renting” the songs for 10 cents the most.

  5. David Boles – New York City – David Boles was born in Nebraska and holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher who writes across the live stage, print, radio, television, film, and the web. With more than 50 books in print, David continues to write 2MM words a year and has authored over 25K articles. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, and founded The United Stage advocacy platform on the principle that playwrights have a duty to direct their own work. Read the Prairie Voice Archive at Boles.com | Buy his books at David Boles Books Writing & Publishing at BolesBooks.com | Study with Script Professor at ScriptProfessor.com | Touch American Sign Language mastery at Hardcore ASL at HardcoreASL.com | Explore the Human Meme podcast at HumanMeme.com | Train with Boles Bells at BolesBells.com.
    David W. Boles says:

    The Music Mover feature works great on a Mac, Dananjay. It’s truly “run it and leave it” and everything is done for you. Then Music Mover watches your iTunes library and when you add new music, it auto-uploads your new songs to LaLa.

  6. David Boles – New York City – David Boles was born in Nebraska and holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher who writes across the live stage, print, radio, television, film, and the web. With more than 50 books in print, David continues to write 2MM words a year and has authored over 25K articles. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, and founded The United Stage advocacy platform on the principle that playwrights have a duty to direct their own work. Read the Prairie Voice Archive at Boles.com | Buy his books at David Boles Books Writing & Publishing at BolesBooks.com | Study with Script Professor at ScriptProfessor.com | Touch American Sign Language mastery at Hardcore ASL at HardcoreASL.com | Explore the Human Meme podcast at HumanMeme.com | Train with Boles Bells at BolesBells.com.
    David W. Boles says:

    Oh, no! Sorry about that, Dananjay! I know they’re actively negotiating with the record companies on many matters. One of the active issues is to increase their enhanced stream rate from 128k to something better, but the record companies are worried about stream ripping. I can understand that concern.

  7. Kathakali Chatterjee – Hyderabad, India – Professionally, I have an interesting concoction of experience -- from entertainment industry to retailing to executive education -- the journey is still on. When I don't work, I love to travel, read, listen to music and watch movies.
    Kathakali Chatterjee says:

    Wow! Love it and miss it…. 🙁

  8. David Boles – New York City – David Boles was born in Nebraska and holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher who writes across the live stage, print, radio, television, film, and the web. With more than 50 books in print, David continues to write 2MM words a year and has authored over 25K articles. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, and founded The United Stage advocacy platform on the principle that playwrights have a duty to direct their own work. Read the Prairie Voice Archive at Boles.com | Buy his books at David Boles Books Writing & Publishing at BolesBooks.com | Study with Script Professor at ScriptProfessor.com | Touch American Sign Language mastery at Hardcore ASL at HardcoreASL.com | Explore the Human Meme podcast at HumanMeme.com | Train with Boles Bells at BolesBells.com.
    David W. Boles says:

    You will love it, Katha! I hope LaLa comes to your home country soon!

  10. David Boles – New York City – David Boles was born in Nebraska and holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher who writes across the live stage, print, radio, television, film, and the web. With more than 50 books in print, David continues to write 2MM words a year and has authored over 25K articles. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, and founded The United Stage advocacy platform on the principle that playwrights have a duty to direct their own work. Read the Prairie Voice Archive at Boles.com | Buy his books at David Boles Books Writing & Publishing at BolesBooks.com | Study with Script Professor at ScriptProfessor.com | Touch American Sign Language mastery at Hardcore ASL at HardcoreASL.com | Explore the Human Meme podcast at HumanMeme.com | Train with Boles Bells at BolesBells.com.
    David W. Boles says:

    Let me know what you find, Gordon. I find myself buying streaming access to all sorts of hard-to-find songs. It’s a delightful service!

  11. A little more than a year ago, when Radiohead released the album In Rainbows they allowed people download it in mp3 format for whatever price they wanted to pay – with no DRM – yet it was not put on my lala account. Very curious!

  12. David Boles – New York City – David Boles was born in Nebraska and holds an MFA from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher who writes across the live stage, print, radio, television, film, and the web. With more than 50 books in print, David continues to write 2MM words a year and has authored over 25K articles. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, and founded The United Stage advocacy platform on the principle that playwrights have a duty to direct their own work. Read the Prairie Voice Archive at Boles.com | Buy his books at David Boles Books Writing & Publishing at BolesBooks.com | Study with Script Professor at ScriptProfessor.com | Touch American Sign Language mastery at Hardcore ASL at HardcoreASL.com | Explore the Human Meme podcast at HumanMeme.com | Train with Boles Bells at BolesBells.com.
    David W. Boles says:

    Gordon —
    Try to manually upload the tracks. Sometimes that works best. If the releases aren’t from a major record company there’s no record of the album existing in the LaLa book logs so LaLa can’t find it.

Comments are closed.