Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
Your Music: Always Available Online
Podcast Audio | Posted by Phil Leigh on December 8, 2008
If you would like to learn about how the Internet Cloud can provide you with an “always-on” connection to your music library along with a sharply reduced cost to add to the collection and try-out new music on demand, this interview is for you.
Our guest today is Geoff Ralston who is the CEO of lala.com. His website will let you (1) maintain your music library in the Internet Cloud, (2) add selections to your library at negligible cost, (3) try-out new music on-demand at little cost, and (3) avoid advertising.
One of the biggest problems facing the record label industry is the challenge of popularizing new releases. Traditionally they have relied upon broadcast radio, but the radio stations are losing influence as their audience moves to the Internet and portable devices. In response the labels have experimented with a variety of Internet initiatives ranging from Internet Radio to advertising-supported websites like MySpace Music that enable visitors to listen to tunes online for free in exchange for advertising revenues.
Lala.com is another initiative that provides the on-demand playback capability of MySpace Music, but avoids advertising. Lala users are permitted to choose 50 selections from the company’s catalog of over 6 million popular tracks and keep them in an online locker maintained in the Internet Cloud. Users may also put their own CD collection in the locker as well. Additional tracks (not among those in your CD collection which are free) may be placed in the locker for merely ten cents each. Users desiring to download tracks onto their portable devices or computers to keep forever are normally charged 89 cents per track.
Company management feels that ultimately consumers will be more comfortable in the browser than in any other software program. Furthermore, they believe that ever-increasing connectivity to the Net will lead consumers to a growing reliance upon Cloud Computing. Essentially the Internet will become something like a “hard drive in the sky” that is accessed only a little more slowly than the hard drive of a computer. However, the “hard drive in the sky” is more universally accessible wherever the user is likely to travel.
Categories: Podcast Audio
Tags: BMG, digital-media, Geoff-Ralston, LaLa, music, record-labels, Sony, Universal-Music, Warner-Music
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Lala seems to be getting really popular these days.
[...] As noted, Apple acquired lala.com in December, but we interviewed the lala.com CEO a year earlier in December of 2008. You can listen to the interview here. [...]