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LaLa's Latest Trick: Rent A Totally Limited Song For $0.10
from the gotta-give-'em-credit-for-trying dept
Over the last few years, we've questioned LaLa's business prospects multiple times. Here was a company that has generated for itself a ton of press -- and a ton of investment money, and we can't figure out why. First, it launched a tremendously hyped up platform for trading CDs. It got widespread mainstream press coverage, despite the fact this was nearly the identical model of another company, Peerflix, who was having trouble getting enough people to bother (not to mention all of the failed "bartering" sites of the dot com bubble years). Even more bizarre, this very much for-profit company, that had (at the time) raised $9 million in venture capital, somehow convinced a NY Times reporter that it wasn't in business to make a profit, and that it was just doing this for the love of music. Uh huh.
Since then, the company has gone through a variety of different business model changes, each one more hyped up than the last. However, each one was equally questionable for anyone who followed the trends in the industry and understood basic economics. Late last year, the company apparently agreed to sell a chunk of equity to Warner Music. Warner, by the way, is widely rumored to have its lawyers going around threatening any music-focused startup that doesn't sell a chunk of itself to Warner, that it will sue them. In some cases, it sues, and then part of the "settlement" is a huge chunk of equity. That's apparently how it got a piece of iMeem, and it's the same thing Warner is supposedly doing with Seeqpod and some others as well. Either way, Lala took the bait rather than get sued, and together they're now getting to launch their latest bad business model.
Slashdot points us to the news, amusingly broken by the CEO of a Lala competitor, Michael Robertson, explaining how
Lala and Warner Music want to rent you songs for $0.10/song. These are songs that can only be accessed via the web. They're quite limited and Warner/LaLa could certainly change the terms at any time leaving you out in the cold. While $0.10/song might get some attention if it were to own the actual files -- such a limited "rental" system that doesn't even allow you to put the songs on your iPod seems like it will be the latest in the list of business models LaLa tests out. At the very least, you have to give them credit for trying.
