I love listening to music. When I'm programming, it helps me get into "the zone" and time seems to pass at a different rate, faster unfortunately. But there's something about music that changes your mind set when you hear it. It speaks to us. The fact that there's different music for every mode and feeling imaginable is a testament to that. Music truly is universal. It bridges time and space, and though different genres cater to certain cultures and ethnicities, it's not limited to them. Music is the universal language that can express our joys and pains, loves and hates, wants and needs, hopes and fears. Don't believe me? Watch a good movie and instead of paying attention to the actors on the screen, listen to the background music. You'll start to notice common themes with certain scenes. Love scenes or tender moments almost always are soft with violins. Heroic scenes almost always are very bold with brass instruments. When the bad guy comes on screen, mostly there's some basic instrument or guitar.
I don't know if the feeling that are invoked while listening to certain instruments are instinctual or if we as a society have been taught this over our lives, but the musical language exists. Movie music is one thing, but when someone speaks of music, they're more than likely talking about the stuff on the radio with voices over it. It's the same language, just with a different dialect. The emotions are conveyed with the words spoken, but the instruments support the mood. It's less subtle than most movie music, but just as effective. It's the reason movies now sell the sound tracks, besides trying to make extra money.
Now if you're like me, you probably have quite a nice collection of music and want to listen to in whenever and where ever. The only thing standing in your way of doing that is the DRM. I don't want to discuss DRM because it disgusts me. I mean the idea of putting limits on what I can do with the stuff I buy makes me want to slap the music industry. Anyway, my collection of music is DRM free because I ripped them straight from the CDs. The problem I have is listening to them where ever I want. I have to burn them all to another disc (probably DVD) and bring them to work so that I can listen to them there. Once I get new music, I have to rip that to both collections to keep them in sync, not that it's necessary. This works pretty well, until I find a better jobs and have to transfer the work collection to my new job. But what if I can't save my collection there?
Lala is not new, but the idea they have is. They have a collection of over 6 million songs that can be streamed to you through you browser using Flash. It feels like there's not a computer on Earth that doesn't have support Flash. They don't have dozens of ads on their pages either, so the music experience is "pure". and I have to say, I honestly hope this takes off and becomes the next big thing.
The way is works is like this: You sign up for the service and you immediately have access to all of the songs in their library. You can play every song available in it entirety once. This allows you to listen to it to see if you like it. Should you decided you want to and it to you web collection, you only pay 10¢ for the ability to stream it to you without limits. Lets say you later want to download the song, and say it's 99¢, well the 10¢ you paid to have unlimited streaming of that song goes towards the full price, meaning you only have to pay the difference or 89¢.
The best part, though, is the MusicMover. by installing this on your computer, it'll look at your iTunes and Windows Media Libraries and attempt to match songs in your library with songs in theirs. If it finds a match, it's added to your web collection, free. If the song is on you computer and it matches, you get it, no matter how you acquired the original song. It even transfers playlists created in WMP and iTunes to the site and you can listen to them. This is quite awesome, I must say.
Unfortunately, there are some down sides, but I'm sure this will be corrected in time. Especially considering this service hasn't even been in existence for a week as of this writing. First limited browser support. For the PC: IE 6.0, 7.0 and Firefox 2.0, 3.0. For the Mac: Safari 3.0, Firefox 2.0, 3.0. Don't get me wrong, this covers like 98% of the computers in the world, but no devices like smartphones. At first I thought I could get around this because my HTC Touch has IE with Flash. But the other requirement, Flash 9. As of this writing, Flash 9 support on devices is pretty scares. The iPhone and all Windows Mobile devices can't play it at this point. And understandably, there is no API available to allow enterprising developers, like myself, create an app for the Windows mobile platform.
I know that Microsoft is creating a newer version of Pocket IE that will have the more advanced versions of Flash installed and Apple is seriously considering allowing Flash onto the device. I believe once that happens, Lala could experience a surge in connections to their service. More than likely, they'll find a way to monitize that stream, maybe like the radio, but short commercials in. And I wouldn't mind that as long as they remain short and infrequent.
Update:
Apparently, I was wrong about no iPhone support
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