Well That Didn't Last Long; Lala Pulls The Plug On Free Streaming

from the lalalalala dept

Fri, Jul 6th 2007 1:20pm — Joseph Weisenthal

Lala seems to be having a hard time settling on a business model. The company started off as a Peerflix clone, a site that would facilitate CD swapping among its users. For some reason, the site's initial launch got tons of press, despite the fact that this model had been tried in the past with little success. More recently, the site started offering free music streaming of Warner Music albums as an inducement to purchase downloads from the site. But it looks like that model wasn't working as planned, as the company has already yanked the free streaming, ostensibly due to high bandwidth costs. There may be some truth to that, but the more likely reason is that nobody was buying any music from the site, or at least not as much as hoped. Since the company is great at generating hype, it will undoubtedly reinvent itself again to much fanfare, but little actual success.

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Anonymous Coward, 6 Jul 2007 @ 2:29pm

maybe part of the issue is that there page doesn't render correctly in firefox.. How am i supposed to take them seriously
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Anonymous Coward, 6 Jul 2007 @ 3:40pm

"generating hype, it will undoubtedly reinvent itself again to much fanfare, but little actual success"

I bet they get more investor money though. Maybe the idea is to hold on long enough to get a juicy buyout. Sound familiar?
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Anonymous Coward, 6 Jul 2007 @ 4:02pm

their
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Eric Williams, 7 Jul 2007 @ 3:20am

Really Proves "The People" Wrong
You know, this is a business model that, had it not flopped, would have been touted by the people that whine about the RIAA and the MPAA, copyright, anti-piracy laws, and the such. But realistically, not in the ideal theory world's that those people live in, people just want free shit. If they can get it free, they don't want to pay for it. No "new business models" are going to make people buy something that they can get for free if it doesn't hold some sort of sentimental value to them.
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