02 May 2010

Aggressive iTunes take-over of free music

I got this in my inbox yesterday:

"Dear Cecilie H.,

The Lala service will be shut down on May 31st.

In appreciation of your support over the last five years, you will receive a credit in the amount of your Lala web song purchases for use on Apple's iTunes Store. If you purchased and downloaded mp3 songs from Lala, those songs will continue to play as part of your local music library. Remaining wallet balances and unredeemed gift cards will be converted to iTunes Store credit (or can be refunded upon request). Gift cards can be redeemed on Lala until May 31st.

Click here or visit Lala.com/support for more information, or to view Lala's Terms of Service.


Thank you.

Lala

©2005-2010 la la media, inc. All rights reserved."


Damn you, iTunes (Apple)! What happened to your "little brother complex"?

As much as I love Apple gadgets I HATE iTunes for its paranoid "thief-thinks-everyone-steals" modus operandi. Why can't iTunes - and the music industry for that matter - understand that the best way to make people buy more music, is to make it easy to find more (related) music that people will like?! Which means: Let people listen on the web for free to explore music (like last.fm used to very good for, now less so, sadly).

My husband and I have bought just about ALL the music for the past 10 years after we stumbled upon it somewhere on the internet (most likely last.fm's "what your friends are listening to" & "what your neighbours are listening to"), the same goes for concerts.

Do we REALLY have to do it like we did in the 1980-90's: Go into a physical music shop, scroll through the piles of albums, bring some to the music bar/desk and ask them to play some tunes from each? Do we really need to pretend that the internet and digital music never happened?? Wake up iTunes/Apple!!!!

2 comments:

Joe White said...

Have you tried Pandora? You can listen for free there and they try match up music with your preferences.

Cecilie said...

Thanks Joe, I know Pandora. I used it in 2005-2006 and then got tired of it since it gave me a pretty narrow selection of songs, and I got tired of listening to the same 20 songs all the time. I hear it's better now.

My main problem with Pandora/iTunes is the playlists - in Pandora's case the lack of playlists. I had spent a good deal of time over 6 years to make my own playlists tailored for different situations - bike ride, dinner, beach, blue sky, late night, party, work and so on and so on. Pandora is not smart enough to guess my mood like that - yet ;-)