Comments on: New Ideas In Online Music Sales From Lala.com

By: Paul Kafasis

Paul Kafasis — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 07:16:51 +0000

Karen: Airfoil will let you transmit Lala's audio, yes. See this Knowledge Base page for more details, it's quite simple: http://rogueamoeba.com/support/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=35&nav=0

By: Karen

Karen — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 20:59:37 +0000

I found AirFoil while searching for ways to listen to LaLa in the living room when my computer lives in my home office. It sounds like Airfoil may be the answer. Has anyone done this?

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:22:54 +0000

I’ve been using Lala.com for about a month or so when they announced their new swath of services. Full previews and low, low prices for big catalog of DRM-free tracks can’t be beat. It’s truly impressive.

They also offer “web songs” which lets you pay $0.10 or less to listen to a song an unlimited number of times in your online LaLa library.

By: Paul Kafasis

Paul Kafasis — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:39:19 +0000

Tom Harrington: That’s an interesting point, and one I’ve seen elsewhere. If it works well enough, this could solve the biggest disk space usage for a lot of people, and make the Air and other small laptops/netbooks, with their small drives, more palatable.

OddyOh: It really is lousy how slowed innovation is outside the US, due to licensing. You wind up with very unhappy potential customers who either have few/no choices, or just resort to piracy. It’s a losing situation for most everyone involved.

By: OddyOh

OddyOh — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:45:24 +0000

Yeah, not surprised it doesn’t work in Canada. Amazon’s music store doesn’t either. Neither does Sony’s PSN video store…nor XBox’s video store. Also no Hulu or other network streaming sites.

iTunes Canada just works, so they win by default. Although it’s missing tons of stuff from the US store (mainly in the movie & TV sections, but even some songs here and there). Ridiculous.

Oh, I guess we have PureTracks, but that interface leaves much to be desired, and only some of their stuff is mp3, the rest is WMA, so have fun with that ‘bag of hurt’, from a Mac users perspective.

By: Tom Harrington

Tom Harrington — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:28:41 +0000

Thanks, Paul, this looks like something I’ll get a lot of use out of. I’m looking at getting a MacBook Air but I don’t think it’ll have room for my iTunes library. This should be a nice way of dealing with that.

By: Paul Kafasis

Paul Kafasis — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 19:51:49 +0000

fahirsch: Licensing and copyright is indeed the issue. It’s foolish, in a digital age where country boundaries are fairly meaningless, but the laws remain. Those laws prevent the stores from opening globally, at least to start. iTunes has been rapidly expanding around the world, and I imagine you’ll see the same from Amazon and others, as they grow in popularity.

By: fahirsch

fahirsch — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:38:30 +0000

I don’t know why, iTunes Store, Amazon, Lala, all work only for people in the United States. iTunes sells in some European countries, but not in Argentina, where I live. I have once heard that it’s for copyright reasons, but I find the explanation stupid. If there is no store where you can buy music, people have no compunction to download from a thousand and one pirate sites. But then, intelligent thinking is apparently unknown in discographic circles