My Friend Tivo25 introduced me to lala.com a few months ago. I am always looking for new music and even spins on old music. Lala is great, it offers a queue for sampling music, social networking to find people with interests and get introduced to music and share it with other networks (facebook), and most of all a great way to easily and comfortably purchase music on a tier.
Chairman Steve at Apple thinks it's good too. Apple recently purchased Lala.com. Like myself, many users had hoped this site would become an extension of iTunes or simply just left alone.
Nope....it goes down May 31st. Thank you Apple, you cheeky B&^@6@!(&%#s. This is something I expected from the likes of Microsoft, not Apple. The iTunes store has many merits, and I am loyal fan, but social networking really leads to music discovery, something Apple has yet to grasp in it's push to appease the big labels, which I hope die in a fiery, brimstone laden, smelly, smoky ball of financial ruin. Sorry, lost it there for a second. Nothing stifles new music faster than shutting down avenues of discovery. Not everyone can go to SxSW every year and we rely on services like lala to produce new music for us.
Today, another avenue was roadblocked, and unfortunately it looks like music lovers on the web will ultimately suffer the consequences. Had it not been for lala and a local radio station (PBS funded 91.7 in Dallas-FortWorth), I would have never discovered St. Vincent, Passion Pit, Little Dragon, Aqualung, Fanfarlo, Efterklang, Shiney Toy Guns, or Ok Go. This leaves Pandora and perhaps last.fm. I will be showing my support for Pandora now with a paid subscription and will create an account on Last.fm probably this weekend.
Bye Lala, I hope to see you on the other side. :(
