LaLa, the CD trading service just launched a new free service that allows members to a play songs on demand, upload their music collection for everywhere access, and transfer music directly to iPods. Users can currently access roughly 200,000 tracks of WMG content for play-on-demand (and hopefully more from other major and independent labels soon). After playing around with the new service for a while, I have some serious misgivings about their implementation and new model.

Installation & Registration
The LaLa player is a small application available for both Mac and PC. The program allows you to “upload” your music collection to LaLa and play your own music, your friends music and tracks featured on LaLa directly within the browser. After you install the player you need to sign up for a free account. Once you are registered you are taken to your “My Music” page. This is where you can upload and access your music library, access and create playlists, and sync to your ipod. It also takes a while to find out where you can upload your profile picture (just look at the People section under the Discover tab and you will see I’m not the only one).



Uploading Music
The process is a bit confusing and LaLa needs to do a much better job of explaining how their service works. First off, does LaLa actually physically upload my music to a server, does it simply scan my library and match songs already on their servers, or is it a combination of both? I have over 21,000 songs in my library and uploading 90Gb of music will not only cost me time but money in bandwidth costs. If I navigate away from the page will my uploading process stop? It took me a while to notice that the LaLa application is not only running in the browser but also in the OSX menu bar. The progress bar also seems to give vague and conflicting information, often disappears on page refreshes, and seriously hampers the performance of the service.



Finding and Playing Music
LaLa provides standard search and browse features for finding music. Similar to Yottamusic, LaLa has a smart search feature that shows matching artists while you type. Why every music service hasn’t figured this one out is beyond me. Browsing by genre is a little less helpful. The main genre selection is sparse (no alternative, world and other popular genres) and no way to dive deeper into subgenres and styles. Main genres pages are poorly marked, there are no genre specific new releases, top artist charts or top songs charts. Individual artist pages are better and contain bios from Wikipedia, discography, top songs, videos from Google, related artists, and fans. They also provide a related artist radio feature. Album pages contain user-created reviews, associated tags, related playlists and fans.



Individual songs and albums are marked with either a grey or red play button. Grey buttons indicate you can hear 30-second samples and red buttons indicate you can hear the full-length track. For some reason, I could not get any samples to play but had no problems with full-length tracks.

Syncing
Once I connected my iPod, I went to an album page of something that was available for on-demand, checked off a bunch of tracks and clicked the “Add to iPod” button. Thats where I got the “You can only sync tracks you own” messaging. Ok then why the hell are giving me the option to sync? LaLa has done a terrible job of explaining the sync feature - I was under the impression that I could add music to my iPod even if i didn’t own it but that just doesn’t seem to be the case. As far as being able to sync my iPod when I don’t have access to iTunes - well OK but personally I really have no use for that.

The Danger of Doing to Much
LaLa started as a CD trading service and the entire experience was built around that primary model - and it worked well. The ability to upload my digital collection and play catalog songs on demand drastically changes the mental model of the service. For instance, under each album there are “want” and “have” buttons. Well what exactly does “have” mean now that i can upload my digital collection? If i bought the album on iTunes, do i “have” it? When I view albums in Rhapsody, I know that (almost) every track is available for playback. This is not the case with LaLa. Albums can either be available for play-on-demand, samples only or no playback at all. Sometimes the CD versions are available for sale and other times they are not. Eventually LaLa will have digital purchases as well. Hopefully as more label deals are signed it will get better but for now this will only lead to user frustration. My experience at MusicNow has taught me that users have a difficult enough time understanding the difference between a subscription service and a store. If the reactions on LaLa’s forum are any indication, users resent the move to be all things to all people.