Gunning For iTunes: New Site Offers Songs For 10 Cents Each

The music junkie has to face the souring economy, too, and it may come to a point where 99 cents for a song on iTunes is too much to pay. For these recession-struck audiophiles, there is a new solution: Lala.com is selling songs at nearly a 90 percent discount off of the iTunes price.

For 10 cents, a user can add a song to his or her library to enjoy -- but only from a browser.

In short, Nguyen is trying to make it easier for Lala.com's customers to sample music and cheaper for them to buy it than at the Apple store where they only get to listen to a 30-second clip before purchasing a song for a 99 cents.

"This will make you just want to consume and consume and consume more music," says Nguyen. He adds that the company already has 300,000 beta users who are doing just that.

Lala.com users will also be able to access their digital music collections from any computer with a web browser.

The site comes from startup veteran Bill Nguyen, who calls Lala.com his own "personal Iraq."

The Los Angeles Times reports that Lala.com has gone through a few iterations, from music swapping to cheap music player:

Lala began in 2006 as a CD-swapping site. In June 2007, it relaunched as a service that allowed visitors to listen to any song -- though only from the Warner Music catalog -- free of charge in hopes that they would then buy CDs. The company shut down that service two months later because it had to negotiate licenses with the major recording companies and independent labels.

As those talks took place over the last year, Bill Nguyen, the company's co-founder and chairman, said he struggled to convey his vision that one's music collection would one day be like e-mail, something to access any time, anywhere. The Web browser would be the new iPod, he said.

Comments

[rjmiller]

Speaking as an aspiring musician, this is dumb. Online distribution like iTunes already screws over artists enough without cutting the price down so much that the label takes the full cut, and I have a feeling that their ad revenue doesn't go to artists at all. I'll gladly give my songs away for free (like my band La Coterie's free EP release next month) before I'll let some corporate labels make money off me while I quickly fall into their debt. If anyone finds value in my music they will be welcome to buy it directly from me, the way it should be.

[palinater08]

lala sounds lame. I really love www.Pandora.com It's free and you get a great mix based on stations you create. It will match music similar to what you like, and often you get to hear new bands in the mix. It's great....

[chickennugget]

this service is lame.
www.playlist.com does this for FREE!!

[Coyote2]

a buck a song is too expensive. Ten cents is better but the songs should be sold in bundles. You pick one to three songs and 5 others are included based on your pick. The extra songs are included to encourage you to listen to other music and to broaden your musical consumption.

So for a dollar you should get 5 to 10 songs.

[ggirl00]

10 cents to rent a song?

[KillTheMessenger]

Which you can hear for free on the radio...

:-)

[nian]

I see Apple filing for bankruptcy any day now with this new fangled program!! LOL.

[TheVicar]

Either there's some heavy subsidizing going on here behind the scenes, they're planning a bait-and-switch later on, they're only offering music which is legally available for free, or else this is a business model which is guaranteed to fail at some point.

On iTunes, out of a 99-cent download, Apple keeps ~35 cents and the rest goes to the recording company and the artists. In an overwhelming majority of cases where the artist does not negotiate the contract themselves, the artist gets between 8 and 14 cents per song after the recording company takes its cut, which is generally more like 55 to 65 cents. When the artist works directly with Apple, they take the share of the recording company as well.

So if Lala is charging 10 cents, then both artists and recording companies would lose money by going with Lala. And that's ignoring the costs of running the business -- Lala must be keeping a cut of that 10 cents, too...

Most likely, this is being subsidized by the record companies in an attempt to kill off iTunes (or force Apple to renegotiate). Once the useful idiots in charge of Lala have served their purpose, they will find that the record companies suddenly pull out.

[oldGunny]

A hack will be out in 10..9...8..7..

[fillou]

Paying 10 cents for something that will not belong to me ? That I can only play on my computer, not even on my MP3 ? It's 10 cents too expensive. American companies really take customers for idiots, I give this website 2 months with that idiotic business model.
Big mistake to think that music can be marketed as movies on the web, totally different products.

[KillTheMessenger]

It's not the companies but the copyright law in the US. When you publish a song, you owe money to the composer. And that alone will cost you roughly ten cents for mechanical licenses.

If you want to challenge that, you have to overturn US copyright laws, first. Good luck with that.

[fillou]

I'd rather 90 cents and OWN the song and own it in a legal way than spend 10 cents to "rent it" and to use it ONLY on my computer. Owning it I can transfer it from my MP3 player to my hard drive in my car, I can use it on slide show make with powerpoint ...
Putting things in prospective, 90 cents to own a song is cheaper than renting it for 10 cents
This company is going to its 3rd business model .... I guess there'll be a 4th one soon.

[WorkingClass]

Ten cents is about what a song should sell for. For ten cents it should be mine to take with me. Until the price gets down to ten cents I will just keep getting my songs for free.

[KillTheMessenger]

It costs roughly ten cents just to license from the composer for a mechanical license.

If you want it that cheap, you will have to steal it.

:-)

[thegreatgiginthesky]

Which is exactly what he plans on doing.