Warner to Bet $20 Million on Song Rentals

[djwayne]

Warner to Bet $20 Million on Song Rentals
5/28/2008 By Shane Sinnott

According to the website of Michael Robertson, a longtime player in the world of high-tech entrepreneurialism, Warner Music has invested $20 Million in the website lala.com, which is soon to offer a service where you can "buy" songs for ten cents.

The setup is a catalogue of over five million songs, each of which you can stream once for free through your web browser. After that, you can "add" a song to your personal collection for a single credit, which costs ten cents. The catch: the songs aren’t downloadable. You can listen to them as much as you want, but only through a web browser in your personal collection area of the lala.com site — they can’t be put on MP3 players, or iTunes.

Warner is gambling that you’ll pay ten cents to stream something that you can probably get easily (and permanently) for free. This might not be as crazy as it sounds: while I don’t think anybody is going to use the site for serious music buying, for the price of a CD you get 200 songs that you can listen to from any computer with an internet connection anytime you want - perfect for those with office jobs or prone to attending parties with bad music.

A quick look through the catalogue rendered it decent enough as Black Dice, Erics Trip, Charlie Parker and Staple Singers all turned up hits. The site hasn’t yet launched publicly, but you can try it in beta — and you get 50 free credits for signing up.

[allphourus]

Just Another Nail In the Coffin

First off It won't take the hackers long to crack any technology system they come up with.They haven't come up with anything ( Hardware or Software ) that couldn't be hacked yet, have they? And than it will be all over the web "free LaLa down load recorder and file converter", End of story.

Second As a consumer I'm personally a "hold it in my hand" kind of guy, I'm not renting anything virtual.

As a musician I'm not going to be involved in ripping off my fans that way.
I would rather give it away for free first.

They dug their own gave, It seems they think it's not deep enough?

We are on the verge of something new and hope wonderful, I don't know what, I just hope it materializes soon, That it's fair and equitable and puts the control the music back in the hands of the artists not the distributors, manufacturers and lawyers.

Art does not lend it self to Industry

Music has nothing in common with business.

Music is Spiritual in Nature ( and therefor already Ephemeral enough )

What passes for business and industry these days is mostly criminal.

Out with the old and in with the new.

[djwayne]

Well I have my music on a page there. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything happens. It's part of my "Musical Experiment." I think there's a lot of experimenting going on to see what will work and what won't. I think it's interesting.