By: Gino Lattarulo
I am saddened by the news that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has purchased and is closing down the LALA.com website, which is an online music service that provided (free) the ability to upload your entire music library to their servers to have a cloud like iTunes experience. That in itself is no big deal. What really drew me to this web site was the cost structure to pay for music. A person could sample music from whatever artist they wish and then have the choice of downloading the entire collection in mp3 form for around $ 7.00 ( .89 cents per song ) or purchase the entire collection exclusively for online use for about $ 1.00 ( .10 cents per song). For a geek like me who has strayed from the shackles of tangible hardware players (except for my XM radio (NASDAQ:SIRI) and almost exclusively listens to music on the web, this was a perfect arrangement. I even have access to it in my car. Take a Netbook , FM transmitter, and Satellite Internet card and you are done. OK , so it isn’t CD quality stuff but it’s a small price to pay for an unlimited library of music. How long do we think it is going to be before the touch screen PC is manufactured into vehicles for this exact reason? Not very long once the networks have beefed up bandwidth to offset inconsistent buffering issues. In any case, I think we can all guess why Apple purchased this LALA company. They are squashing any threat to iTunes. Not that there is a huge contest of course. iTunes is obviously the king of the digital download land but cloud formats are quickly becoming the new sheriff in town and they are here to stay. If I had to hazard a guess, I think Apple wants to use this LALA cloud structure for the Itunes experience. If they are smart, they will. And we all know they are.
Enter Grooveshark.com.
This website just can’t be legal can it? I have yet to search for a song or artist that I have not been able to find. Any song, any artist, free. Grooveshark provides the listener with the ability to create play lists as well as uploading his/her music library to the site. AHA! So that is how you can find your music. The ultimate in file sharing. Except, you can’t download anything. It is for online listening only, and based on this format you also have to rely on other people correctly titling the songs and artists to be able to find what you want. So while Grooveshark is not as accurate as say, Pandora or Slacker, it is still a better mouse trap based on an old idea and has become a smashing success. Again, for people who are tethered to a PC or Blackberry (NASDAQ:RIMM), having the ability to key in whatever artist or song you want from any location is just too appealing to resist. The only real limitation here for most people is the ability to listen to streaming music in their car. Not that they can’t of course, but the general public isn’t interested in what adapter hooks up to where so they can use an FM transmitter through the…… blah blah blah. I tried explaining it to a friend once and his eyes started glazing over as soon as I said the word “buffer”. So from an ease of use perspective, CD’s and digital download devices are currently the standard and will be for awhile.
Alright Bob Johnson, here we are at The Crossroads. On one side we have the ability to purchase downloadable music and transfer it to a CD or Ipod, and on the other side we have smart phones and compact Internet devices with continually evolving Apps that enable a listener to stream music cloud sites without having to buy anything at all… Yet.
So what’s next? What does the future hold for our ear candy? Will it all eventually be free or will it be subscription based? And which companies will benefit the most? These and other questions to be answered on the next episode of Soap. I mean KOAT.
To be continued…
I’m and ex-Lala user and BETA tester. I’m now on MOG and also doing BETA testing on RDIO. Based on the fact that the “music streaming” market is being over-saturated because everyone wants a piece of this new pie. The future of music is in-the-clouds and in particular “digital lockers.”
You will have access to your “digital locker” with all your music available to you via a subscription service from anywhere using; a home computer(which will be downsized), a smart phone or a portable device such an “internet ready digital player.” All you would do is access your ‘digital locker” and you have all your music and playlists ready to play. RDIO and MOG both work as in-the-clouds “digital lockers” but on RDIO at least your music is matched to their catalog. Which is less time spent adding songs/albums to your library.
Based on Lala’s prices, which were great because of the “web song” 10 cent pricing, in only 2 1/2 weeks I would have spent over $1000.00 on Lala. Now on RDIO or MOG it’s about $5.00 a month for an all you can eat subscription. This is where music streaming is heading; the leasing or rental of songs, which is perfectly fine with me. In the end it’s the consumer that comes out on top based on the pricing. Even if we had to pay $20.00 a month, it’s well worth every penny.
Consumers need to come to the realization that the future of music is not in downloading or owning the physical song files/cds. We need to let go of this mentality of; “I own this song, or I own so many many CDs.
All this is going to happen faster than what anyone thinks.
Sirius Radio has by far the best content and no one else can match it. To answer your question Gino Lattarulo the future of music subscription based such as Sirius Radio, people will always pay for something good!