If you’ve poked around here before, you may remember that I blogged about how I love Pandora for listening to great music and finding new music I didn’t know I liked. Hopefully you’re enjoying it–the variety is especially nice for Christmas music.
I have a new favorite music site that you need to know about if you don’t already.
Lala.com is a new site that, similar to Amazon.com and iTunes and a handful of others, has pretty much every song you could imagine. But here’s the killer feature: Once you create an account, you can have 1 full listen through of ANY SONG for free. So say, for example, that I told you “Needle in a Haystack Life” by Switchfoot was a great new song that you should download. Or that I said I loved the new Switchfoot CD, Hello Hurricane, and that you should check it out. You would create an account at Lala.com, search for Switchfoot, find it and listen to it. You could listen to one song, or the whole CD. It’s very easy to use. After you use up your free full listen-through, Lala.com automatically reverts to playing you 30 second clips. You can then do one of three things. You can 1) buy the CD or 2) buy the mp3 download or 3) for usually around a dollar, you can buy the ability to listen to the album on Lala.com as much as you want. Personally, I’d still buy the music on Amazon.com or iTunes…or maybe buy Lala.com’s mp3 download if the price was right (or 4) realize it was a bad choice, and save your money).
But here’s the other killer feature: Lala.com makes a free program you can download to your computer that scans your library and sends that information back to the server. It automatically ‘unlocks’ your personal music library for unlimited play on lala.com. Here is why this is great: Say that you have a lot of mp3s on your home computer, but you’d like access to all of them from another computer…at work, on campus, at a friend’s house, etc. This gives you the ability to listen to your entire personal collection of music on any internet-connected computer! I tested it out and found a couple of neat additional things: first, it synced all my iTunes data–playlists, ratings, play count, etc. Also, it synced my whole collection. Whether I bought it on iTunes, Amazon.com, or ripped it myself from a CD…it ALL made it into Lala.
Check it out and tell me what you think. When you do check it out, please click on one of the links in this post to go to Lala.com and create your account. They do give me a little ‘referral’ credit for free song plays when you do (That said, I would tell you to get an account and use this site even if they didn’t. Really. It’s that useful).