Now that online radio juggernaut
Lala has gone the way of the dodo after being acquired by Apple, what's a music fan to do? Especially if that music fan is camped out in front of a computer screen all day without access to her own music collection? Well, for starters, there's always
Last.fm and
Pandora, but neither offer the play on-demand service that was Lala's calling card. Want to hear a record before you can buy it? I mean, actually listen to the the thing in full, not those annoying 30-second previews? Lala was the best place to preview new music. According to
PopMatters:
For those that didn’t use it, Lala gave members and nonmembers one listen to an album, free of charge – the equivalent of giving you an hour at a bookstore to look over a new release before purchase. If there was a track you wanted someone to listen to at work, chances were high that Lala would pass work Internet filters while iTunes and YouTube were on the “no surf” list. And if you were a blogger, you could add a soundtrack to your post by embedding tracks onto your site with a widget.
There are rumors of some sort of
iTunes cloud system in the works, but it's just that: rumors. Until then we might just turn our old school radios back on and party like it's 1999. Or 1979.
