“The web is home to more new music each year than was released in many previous decades. Critics say the music is mostly junk – but the same could have been said for the Web before Google made the knowledge there accessible.”

I couldn’t agree more.

So you can pay 10 cents to ‘buy’ access to a track an unlimited amount of time however if you own the track already on your computer (and you let lala scan your library) you can listen to that track for free an unlimited amount of times. You can also buy full track downloads for 90 cents. Sounds all pretty complicated and I agree with what Bob Lefsetz was posting yesterday:

[...] With x number of people new to Google this year, what are the odds consumers are going to understand Lala’s business model?  Shit, I can’t understand their business model.  I rent the music online, but only online, I can use my own stuff online…what about the rarities, do those get uploaded too?  And, is it so complicated that I ultimately want to use this service? [...]

TechCrunch has got a different opinion and I get their point of view:

[...] Conversely, Lala wants you to listen to as much music as possible in the hopes that you’ll keep clicking that addictive 10 cent “web song” button, and is forgoing advertising entirely. The result is very refreshing. [...]

What I find refreshing is that those new ideas are coming out of a company that is party owned with Warner Music. There was never any doubt that there are very smart people working at Warner and it looks like we can now see some of that. It was always obvious that the big content owners should have been much more pro-active when it comes to new ways of monetizing their content. They missed out on that for years and are suffering because of that.

I can’t test out lala myself (as it’s only available in the US) but it sounds like it’s not very user friendly but makes sense in the end. Lets hope people out there are going to have the patience to figure all that out. And if not they can always come up with a new model.