03 November 2009

Lovin' it in Lala Land

A Yahoo! news blurb last week alerted me to a new arrangement between Google, Facebook, and "Lala," an online music service that I had never heard about before. Evidently it has been around for awhile, but Lala is entirely new to me. As I've had opportunity to begin playing around with it, I'm really lovin' it, and I suspect that others might appreciate it, too.

Lala has a catalog of 7 million songs. You can listen to any of those songs in its entirety for no charge. That's better than the 20- or 30-second song clips that you can listen to on Amazon or elsewhere. If you want to check out a new song or artist, you can do so at Lala without any cost.

You can also upload your own music collection onto your Lala site, and then access your music from any other online computer. That's nice for me, as I've been methodically ripping my CDs onto my laptop over the past year or so; now, via Lala, I can access them and listen to them from pretty much anywhere else.

Of course you can purchase music from Lala, too, although you don't have to buy anything. You can add songs to your online collection for 10 cents apiece; or download them as MP3 files for 89 cents. I'm not buying any downloads, but there's a lot of "one-hit wonders" out there, and I'm glad to add some of those to my online collection of songs. Then I can listen to them on demand when nostalgia strikes.

Lala is now linked up with Facebook, too, in such a way that you can share songs and make music recommendations, or let your virtual friends know what you are listening to (or not).

For me, this is all quite exciting. If you'd like to check it out for yourself, you can do so here.

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