Streaming music has gotten pretty popular among iPhone owners and today we'd like to introduce you to one more option, Lala.
Lala gives you the ability to listen to any song for free one time, if you happen to like the song you pay $.10 for unlimited listening. And at $.10 per "Web Song" you can pretty much purchase a full album for a single dollar. That may not convince all of you but Lala has one more trick up it's sleeve. You can upload your entire music library from your computer to the cloud for you to stream back to your iPhone, completely free. Lose you data connection for some reason? No worries as Lala uses caching to save your music. Exactly how much is cached is not known just yet but it's a nice feature regardless.
This is definitely an app worth taking a closer look at when it hits the App Store, it should be free to download and you can expect to see it available within the next few weeks.
Reader comments
Lala iPhone Music Streaming App Coming Soon
Yea! And now the challenge to be last!
Btw, I've never heard of lala, but I like it! .10 cents sounds good to me!
Quality: 32 kbps
not even worth 10 cents !
Extremely lame. They are supposedly streaming at a 32k bitrate, which will sound like an AM radio circa 1975. Nice way to listen to your own music. Just buy a 32 GB iPhone and load your darned music onto it. Then, just pay $14.99 a month for Rhapsody. Once you listen to 150 LaLa songs in a month that you already have heard once, you will exceed that cost. And, when they go out of business because their business model is silly, your $.10 "unlimited" listening will vanish. You could say the same thing about Rhapsody, but its been around for a long time, and once the updated iPhone app is approved, look for increased listeners. LaLa, though, is a NoNo.
Looks pretty nice. I'm a huge fan of this idea.
The coolest streaming app I've seen so far is the "Panel" application from wearepanel.com. They feature new music and recommendations from industry insiders every week.
What do you want to bet this doesn't make it into the store. Google's music app that will compete with iTunes will soon be using Lala as a source. How will this fit with the non-compete rule with apps?
My issue with streaming in general is: AT&T's network has been so dodgy that streaming would be constantly interrupted by the network jumping between 3G and Edge.
I'm reluctant to download any app that requires a strong and constant connection.
32k bitrate means nothing unless you know the encoding.
Mp3 would suck.
AAC would sound pretty good.
Woohoo, who needs iTunes anymore, well at least for music anyway
Icebike: Why listen to music you already own over a stream? Storage issues? Just use an iPod classic if it is really a problem. This makes no sense at all. Their announcement of their new service indicated that they were streaming only at 32k because of the capacity of cell carriers. That does not bode well.
Damnit! I thought you meant stream from my iPhone to local iTunes!
No one will pay 10 cents to listen to AM radio!
I used dizzler to stream music, there's no app for the iphone yet, but I created a shortcut to have it in my menu. Works good, plus is free!
Finally, another music app! The App Store needs more apps! :roll:
@JeffreyR
Exactly my take as well.
I can't see me buying into this, but occasionally it might be nice for those "Hey you remember that song by the YakYaks?" moments that happen at parties.
My point in my comment above was to all those carping about 32K bitrate. 32K of AAC is pretty good sound.
Surf on over to di.fm or sky.fm and listen to 24K bitrate AAC on the iphone. Its plenty serviceable, and it will work well on 3G.
Pass-- nothing like FREE songs !
@JefferyR:
On the other hand (he says, jumping to the other side of the fence.....)
If you read their press release at their own site rather than the twice filtered report posted above these guys might be on to something: http://www.lala.com/#press
First off, you can stream any song for free once, then add it to your collection for 10Cents so you could have it any time you wanted it, as often as you want.
Then if you want to purchase a DRM free MP3 for download its 79 Cents additional, and you can put it on any device you want.
Thats 10% cheaper than iTunes, and you could merge them to your iTunes library.
Your personal collection that you already own, you don't even have to upload. They just see that you have it already, and add it to the music you can stream. If its not in their database, you do have to upload.
They also support a CD trading framework, so you can sell all those CDs you no longer use. (It would be illegal to copy them into your iTunes library and then sell the originals. cough ).
These guys are in partnership with Google so it might gain some traction. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/28/live-from-hollywood-googles-music-o...
I'm still not buying in tho...
I wish these players / services would start taking advantage of more of the metadata so we could sort and search by other metrics. Things like Key.. Tempo..
These guys are doing it for iPhones and Desktops , but a major doing it would be very cool.
http://www.cadenceapp.com
I would use rhapsody if you are going to use iPhone streaming because it's unlimited songs for a monthly fee instead if paying song by song if you like to listen to a lot of music.
I have been waiting for this app for a while. My iphone is only 8gb and now I will be able to store all my music on lala.
To all those who think it is going to die, lala just became a partner with facebook and google. I think it is going to takeoff in the next year and would be surprised if everyone with an iphone and almost everyone with a facebook account won't sign up with lala very soon.
The advantage here isn't the purchasing element, but the idea that you upload your own music from Mac / PC into the free cloud, then you can listen to a larger assortment of stuff than a standard 32gb iPhone can contain.
Also, why hate on the notion? This is unquestionably the way things are going. Besides... 32k is the MINIMUM. It can stream up to 128, and that will improve when bandwidth does. I'm certain they've created a model that's flexible in that way.
It's free, so just enjoy it. Upload all your dodgy podcasts and audio books for now, just to save PodSpace.
IcePulse has got it right here guys. Its not about how much they charge at this point, that is only for buying or "renting" songs. The clear advantage is being able to upload your 15,000 mp3s for free and to be able to have access to them all organized with all of the correct metatag data, organized by album, artist, title, etc..Between the web interface and the iphone app, you will have a virtual on demand Ipod system with access to your playlists, etc....anywhere in the world...for free. I went to their site and signed up for an account and I have to say, I wanted to NOT like it, but I really did. It was very interesting and unique to anything else on the web at the present time except maybe Spotify which isnt available in the US at this point. Try it out and shoot me a line at murphy917 (my lala profile name) It looks like it has a social networking aspect to it too like facebook/twitter but on a smaller scale.
Really awesome way to store and listen to your music! Not sure why people are dissing the quality it sounds pretty good to me. Can’t wait for the iPhone app, if of course those Base Tards at Apple allow it!