Why I'll Miss Lala
Written May. 3, 2010 by Sean Ross in Music Industry + Technology with 0 Comments
With the news that Apple is shutting down Lala.com, perhaps in anticipation of some sort of cloud-based iTunes, there is no reason not to go public anymore with the reasons I liked Lala.
I'm still from the generation that wants to own hard copies of music, even if that hard copy is merely my purchased MP3 burned to a CD-R. So the music-in-a-cloud thing was not their killer ap, for me. But . . .
Lala was cheaper than the iTunes Music Store, not enough to bother with when the difference was 89-cents vs. 99-cents, but definitely when it was 89-cents vs. $1.29.
And it allowed me, in at least one instance, to buy a soundtrack song without forcing me to buy the entire rest of the album.
As somebody who uses iTMS mostly for catalog -- and not the kind of catalog that a lot of people are so anxious to own -- I've been surprised recently by how many songs have gone up to $1.29 and how few obscurities have gone down to 59-cents.
Why shouldn't somebody pay more for an in-demand hit song, labels asked? Fine. So why should I pay as much as a current hit for the 1967 obscurity "You Can Bring Me All Your Heartaches" by Lou Rawls? Now, if this was a merit-based system...
Fortunately, there's still Amazon.com when you disagree with iTMS pricing. At least today.
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