Lala's Streaming Album Experiment Over... For Now

According to Ars Technica, Lala's recent experiment with providing free streams of thousands of albums is over. For now.

Lala claims that it has suspended the service for several reasons, including that it was causing a massive strain on its servers (to the detriment of its older customers who were looking only to trade CDs), and because it is still in the process of negotiating deals with a number of additional labels to permit free streaming of albums over Lala's site. They say they'll be re-launching the service when they can offer a wider range of albums for streaming.

I'll take Lala at their word for now and believe that the streaming service is coming back. I hope it is. Recorded music has become a commodity that people generally expect to be free or cheap, and when people actually spend money on music, it's generally a "spur of the moment decision". (See my decision to pre-order the new New Pornographers album at the mere mention of a few free B-sides and an early free stream of the album.)

Lala's service is (or will be) well-positioned for this type of sale, given that you can listen to an album and, if you like it, simply click a button and buy it. I know there's a lot of discs I'd end up buying this way (assuming that Lala keeps its cheap CD pricing) rather than waiting for an album to finally end up on the torrent sites (at less-than-stellar bitrates).

Lord knows there's got to be a better way to try to sell records these days than suing children.