Lala: The Long Forgotten Music Platform

 by Morgan Stone

 

Chances are, very few of people reading have experiences with Lala. It was only around between 2006-2010, and at that time, I was simply a child. And while it seems to have been influential enough to get Apple involved, from what I can tell, it didn't have mainstream usage.

For the unacquainted, Lala was an online music store that in many ways rivaled Apple's iTunes. You initially could just trade CDs with other users, then it evolved into allowing individuals to inexpensively purchase songs to play on the Lala website (for as little as ten cents per songs). You could also buy the rights to download the song for, still, under a dollar. You could even "try" a song and stream it all the way through once for absolutely free. Understandably, Apple wasn't the biggest fan of this. 

Lala was soon purchased by Apple in December 2009, and not even six months later, they had decided to shut down the website in it's entirety. After 4 short years, Lala was completely gone, and so was any of the web-based purchases that users had made over it's existence. 

Users were "compensated" by Apple with credit that essentially equated to one free iTunes song per 10 purchased on Lala. Of course, Apple got something out of this, which was Lala's cloud servers for storing music. It wouldn't be TOO terribly long before Apple would have a cloud-based music streaming service of their own, but that was primarily urged into existence by the popularity of Spotify. Though, we simply wouldn't have the platforms we have today without the influence of Lala.

I never personally used Lala, being between the ages of 5 and 9 and without a personal device to purchase and download music on. If I hadn't been introduced to it, I probably would have never heard about the platform. It would simply be lost to time, and I wouldn't be writing this article right now. However, there was someone who was intimately familiar with it and was an avid user: my older sister.

When I was younger, I remember my sister sitting me down and showing me music. I'd sit on her bed with her as she played music through a speaker and either a laptop or her iPod Classic that could hold a whopping 1000 songs! Most of the songs I loved outright, or more likely, loved then pretended to hate...because she's my sister and I didn't want to let her "win." It's a very rare song that I would call my nemesis. However, the list includes, but is not limited to, famous parlor song "Beautiful Dreamer" and "Birdhouse In Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants, known for having 18 key changes in a roughly 3 minute long song. And these are songs that my sister would play and I would run away screaming.

This collection of songs stays quite prominently in my mind as what my sister made me listen to and *probably* bought off of Lala. I don't know for sure, since she could have used iTunes, but I know for a FACT that she regularly used Lala. I remember her pulling up the site and looking for songs. While I may not have much to say about them today musically, they live strongly in my mind and I decided they may be fun to share for this article.

 (And yes, I am well aware of how ironic it is to include my Lala-themed playlist on Apple Music)

This exploration into Lala leaves me with questions about just how prominent this website was, and what it would look like if it were still around today. Did a radio station in 2007, such as KWCW, have DJ's using Lala to source their music? What kind of quality was it? What as the licensing like?

To try and answer some of these questions, I turned to the one person I know who used the platform: my older sister Samantha Stone. 

My sister says she started using Lala because her middle/high school band teacher had recommended it to her, saying that it would be the future of music education. From her memory, the way the website functioned is consistent with my research. You could stream songs within their website for as little as 10 cents, then pay more for a download. 

She says that she loved using the site and it was novel and fresth, and we can confirm that the site looked like a lot of blue. 

As for the playlist that I've collected, some things align and some don't. She remembers buying They Might Be Giants, Owl City and The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger albums, but some of the songs that I remembered her showing me came from a much later point in time. Janelle Monet and Esperanza Spalding were simply of a later time, and I couldn't differentiate them in my memory since I was so young. 

And there we have it: a short dive into the history of the beloved but forgotten music platform Lala. We're in a different time regarding how we listen to and experience music, and I imagine that at the time, there was something exciting about being at that moment where the internet was allowing for new experiences. We currently have massive access to anything, but I imagine there was something special about trading CDs with someone you didn't know. Something more intimate.