Lala Offers Unlimited, Ad-Free Streaming for $0.10 Per Song

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on October 21, 2008 - 9:22am.

Palo Alto, Calif. - Lala on Tuesday launched what it says is the first free digital music streaming service that is also free of advertising. In addition to streaming any of the service's over 6 million songs from all four majors and over 170,000 independents one time for free, users can pay 10 cents per song to add them to a "Web collection," where they can then stream them an unlimited number of times from any Internet-connected device.

Songs can also be purchased outright in the DRM-free MP3 format for 79 cents -- or 89 cents if a user has not already paid the 10 cents to add the song to their Web collections.

"Right now, if you're a consumer, you can get free music. The problem is, the free music comes at the cost of advertising," Lala founder Bill Nguyen told Wired.com.

"It doesn't work right, because for someone like MySpace or Imeem, they pay for every single play and then they have the burden of getting advertising to pay for it. So their goal is to create as many ads in front of you as they possibly can before they play the song...

"The concept was, we can create a great service with your music and new music all in a web page -- no ads," Nguyen added.