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Switched On: Lala sells access to a song for a song
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. If Lala.com has its way, the Web song will do to the MP3 file what the MP3 file did to the CD. The maverick music website, which began as a CD trading site and moved into Internet radio, announced an ambitious plan last year to license the catalogs of the four major music labels as well as those of many independents. It would provide unlimited listening to its members in the hopes of stimulating buying. Listeners would pay only when they wanted to transfer music to their iPods; Lala had even developed a way -- since abandoned -- to transfer music directly to Apple's portable player from its website... circumventing iTunes.Lala eventually got its licenses. But somewhere along the way, the promise of free unlimited listening proved too good to be true, How it now works is that any song you don't have on your local PC but which Lala has made available online in its clean, ad-free user interface can be listened to for free, but only once, after which it must be purchased. One option for purchasing is the the "web song," which is essentially access rights to a track that you can stream indefinitely, but cannot download.The benefit, in addition to not having to manage a library of files, is the price -- a mere 10 cents per song or even less when bought as part of an album. And in a nod toward its original philosophy of encouraging "try before you buy", Lala will credit the price of the web song toward the purchase of the MP3 file. Purchased MP3 files are then added to your iTunes library just as they are when music is purchased from the Amazon MP3 store. But even though they can't be downloaded, web songs will have plenty of company with your other tunes.
