A woeful decision to close the Lala Music Service on May 31st was made public by the site's owners, Apple, on April 30th.
Apple's closure announcement had the character of an eviction notice. Its curt and terse manner was guaranteed to cause ill will among Lala members. No recognition of or provision was made for the the great amount of writing that members created during their usage of the site.
Virtually every utterance that a member made onsite (the text of recommendations, public reviews, public blurbs to other members, the list of tracks and albums that they bought access to, the contents of their playlists) are all indexed and accessible from a member's Lala profile.
Apple's attitude seems to be if you can manually drag out bits and pieces of your contributions during the month of grace we grant you, fine, but we'll provide you no assistance and we'll be happy to burn all record of your efforts as we raze the site.
No explanation was offered to explain the rationale behind the closure decision, so it's not possible to know what factors affected the decision, which parties made the decision, or what their reasons were.
Those who want to make sense of what happened are left with speculations.
It could be that Apple is entirely to blame. They bought the site from its founders early this year at a steep discount to what was considered the site's market price, never a sign that a purchased organization or its software product is long for this world.
There was talk that Apple coveted the Lala technical staff because they had solved many hard problems involved with running a site that sold music as Lala did, and that Apple would want to apply that knowledge to the betterment of its iTunes store.
Why would they care to maintain a second music vending site, when the one they owned, seemingly owned the music world?
It could be the purchase was made on the basis of what the new staff could do to solve the purchasing organizations goals without much care about the characteristics and benefits created by the product that those people had previously created.
We who were enamored of Lala, feared that the site would close quickly because of these considerations. When the axe didn't fall as we expected it to, we started to hope that "our site" had been spared.
Since the closure announcement, we've heard reports that Apple couldn't come to agreement with the music labels to renew Lala's license to vend their music, because the labels were not willing to allow Apple to run two separate music sites at once, especially when the second site had features such as those that Lala offered.
Lala did two things for its members that the industry didn't like much.
First, Lala allowed members to upload their own music collections to the site. If Lala noticed that an uploaded track precisely matched a track that they knew was in their library, Lala would waive the $.10 per track online access fee that would normally be levied if you wished to have continued streaming access to the track or wished to recommend it to another member.
If Lala could not match an uploaded track, it still appeared in the member's library and could be played at any logged in web browser that the user visited. Such tracks were not available to be recommended to others however.
The industry's attitude seemed to be, if you wanted access to your music in a a new format, you should pay for that privilege, something the labels had banked on through all of the transitions from 78's, to LP records, to tape formats, to compact disks, and now, they thought, to downloadable formats.
In early format transitions, music customers had no capability to make the necessary translations themselves, and new storage media were used, so it was somewhat reasonable that the labels charged to produce their works again using new technology.
In a world, though, where any personal computer can perform the translations on music stored on an earlier media, and translate that into a digital format that can be stored on the user's own storage devices, there is no requirement or need that the music labels play any role in this translation process anymore.
To me, it seems silly to think that they can demand to be reinserted into the translation process and continue to charge for their unnecessary presence there.
If this were an issue in Lala's continuance, the industry seems to have been willing to foreclose on a valuable new development in the music marketplace, in order to be able to pound the table on behalf of a privilege that they are inevitably going to lose.
The second issue concerned a Lala technology that was sheer brilliance if your goal was to sell music to as many customers as you can find.
Lala's policy was to play any track within its library once, entirely for free, for any member who wished to hear it. Once the track had been completely played through, the member would only be able to hear the 30 second sample of a track that most music sites provide to their prospective customers.
The beauty of the Lala site, above all, was that it provided a flood of music recommendations for its members that a member was very likely to enjoy and act upon. No industry expenditure was necessary to encourage this activity. With this kind of facility in place, lack of available promotion funds did not necessarily equal death and dissolution.
Those recommendations were most frequently emailed to the recipient by other Lala members who the recipient decided to follow. Because of this play-through-once policy, the recipients of recommendations could verify for themselves the claims that a reco sender had made about a piece of music.
If magic was happening in a particular piece of music, the listener could find it and hear it. These remarkable musical experiences that could be experienced in a piece, almost never occurred in the the 30 second sample dribble that the industry was prepared to provide to its customers.
The industry reaction to this play-once policy seemed to be "OMG, you're giving away the store, are you nuts"?!!!
If the music industry mavens thought it best that Lala should close because of this thinking, I believe the future will show that with this decision, the industry blighted a development that would have grown to become increasingly fruitful and valuable for its future development.
Of course, we can wisecrack with appropriate snark "What's new? They've been doing that for decades. That's why they live in the House of Pain today".
So what was so great about Lala (and still will be for two more weeks)? The industry's attitude I think must have been "so we closed another store, BFD (Big F-ing Deal). There are many others who will do exactly our bidding."
The industry sales model for decades has been to expend enormous money to promote a few albums worth of music in the hope of garnering huge sales for those few, while ignoring the value in their ever expanding back catalog. Now that they can't afford to spend the enormous amounts of promotion money that they relied on for sales, they needed to develop other low cost methods to cause their music to sell.
I believe both Apple and the music industry ignored a characteristic of Lala that could have given them the effective, low cost promotion method that they did not have the wit to develop for themselves.
Once a Lala member located the correct people to follow on the site, they would receive a flow of on-target music recommendations at a rate that was almost more than a single human listener could handle.
Because of clever social engineering in Lala,an ever increasing number of Lala members auditioned thousands (the ambitious heard tens of thousands) of pieces of music that they had never listened to before, and purchased access to hundreds and sometimes thousands of tracks in a year's time.
What was the key bit of social engineering that was used? Lala successfully convinced and gave incentives to its members to send recommendations to other members of the music they personally loved best. This continual exchange of valuable hints for new music to hear, led to the development of feelings of gratitude and reciprocity among members that created a feeling of community among music loving friends who grew to know each others minds through Lala.
A sentiment that you frequently heard among Lala-ites was that before they joined, they knew almost no one who liked music as much, or knew as much, as those they found on Lala, and who liked the kinds of music that they liked most, whatever that might have been. And many eventually expressed amazement at the music that they ended up liking because another member shared and explained their enthusiasms.
Lala provided many different devices to allow a member to identify others who were experts about music they wanted to learn about. It also provided many other mechanisms for the adventurous to make their own discoveries that were buried in their catalog.
Finally, the user interface design and performance of the site was amazing to experience. The number of links and cross links that were presented legibly on almost any Lala page in a logical way, using minimal screen real estate, was immense. To respond to many of these links a database query would have to be executed reliably with extremely fast response time. Many of the social engineering devices the site supported required that the site database be updated extremely quickly in a uniform way in response to many member's simultaneous actions.
And with all of that going on in the background, it managed to provide a music stream to any member who requested it, a second or two after a request was made, and was able to negotiate its streaming transactions in such a way that listeners rarely experienced delays during a music playing session.
Lala's user interface design was worthy of study for the large number of great small things that cohered into an enjoyable user experience on the site.
Briefly, here ere are some of the features Lala provided that allowed a new member to build a community for themselves on the site.
Unless a member decided to stay private, their Profile was visible to everyone else on the site. The Profile recorded voluminous data about a person's listening and musical preferences that allowed others to easily use these clues to figure out if that member might be a congenial musical companion on the site.
Lala kept a reverse chronological listing of the last 500 tracks that a member had listened to onsite. If a member had uploaded a large music collection that listed thousands of tracks in a genre that another was interested in, that person might prove to be a good one to Follow.
A member could decide to Follow any listener with a publicly accessible profile. As soon as they execute the transaction to follow a member, that person would receive an email saying that a new person was following them, and would see that this new person's pictorial avatar had been added to the list of their followers. The avatar of the new person to follow would also be added to the list of people that this member follows.
These lists of Followed and Followers were publicly visible and could be examined to discover other congenial persons to share music with.
Any member could send a public message, called a Blurb, to another with an accessible Profile. Any exchange of Blurbs was visible in each member's profile, and constituted a collection of hints about how a member thought, what their character was and what their musical interests were. One more way to discover a new person to Follow.
Lala kept statistics on user listening and their recommendation history with respect to each artist recorded in its database and all of the artist's albums.
Lala used a score keeping currency, the Influencer point total, to help members identify those who were expending the most effective effort to help others find enjoyable music to listen to.
A recommendation on Lala was a private email sent to a particular member or a small list of members (10 max) which contained a Play button visible that pointed to an album, track or user playlist that the sender suspected the recipient might enjoy listening to.
Recipients had no obligation to act on the recos that they received.
If a reco did induce the recipient to listen to the track because of the sender's accumulated reputation or because of his persuasiveness or knowledge of another's interests, an Influencer point was awarded. If the the recipient liked the album or track so much that he bought streaming Internet access to the track for 10 cents or bought it to download for $.79 more, additional Influencer points were awarded.
Lala ranked all members by the Influencer points that they earned in each of the genre and sub-genre classifications that the site kept track of and posted the point leaders on the main page for each of the genres and sub-genres.
Consulting this list was another way that a member could find another that they liked to follow. Members with a competitive cast of mind vied to accumulate points to increase their rankings within the genres for which they had expertise.
Every Lala member was provided with their own Feed page, which in real time reported upon the recent activities on Lala of the people they followed. A member could follow as many other Lala-ites as they wished to.
I followed 104 other Lala members by the time I received the Lala condemnation notice and 200-some followed me. Following that number of people was starting to make me feel that my feed list was not large enough. By following those hundred people, my feed was reporting the last several hours of Lala activity of those people. Earlier, when my count of Follows was smaller, my Feed showed me nearly an entire day of the activity of those I followed.
In the Feed, effective tricks of software interface design were used to control its length.
The sequence of the last 20 or 30 tracks listened to by a Followed member were reported there, each listed with a player button that would cause the corresponding track to play. Each track listed was recorded as a clickable link. Following the link would launch the page in the site database which showed all of the tracks for its album and all of its associated listener snd Influencer info plus any member-contributed reviews.
Whenever a a member performed a sequence of repeated actions (listening to tracks, buying albums or tracks, making ratings, submitting a review, posting a Blurb or a review) those actions were summarized in a clever way.
Those repeated actions were collected into a sublist, and by default only the last action in a sequence was reported in the Feed list and the other of other actions of that type the member had performed in sequence.. That last action would have an expand/collapse control next to it that a member could click if he cared to view the users actions in details.
This mechanism prevented the feed from exploding in size and made it possible for a member to follow a large number of others and benefit by taking advantage of their experience and benefiting from their knowledge. A member could help other find music by just doing what they thought was most enjoyable on Lala.
Lala provided each member with a menu listed at the top of their Profile that allowed that member to filter the feed contents by a number of different categories, which had the effect of making their feeds seem larger since they could see a larger number of other actions this way.
If you wanted to see which of your actions were reported to other folks' feeds, there was a button to switch from viewing other activities to viewing your own, as others would see them.
When you visited another member's Profile,there were panels to allow you to monitor the contents of that member's collection, their listening history,and any Blurb threads they had started with other members.
A drop down menu was available in a member Profile menu bar which reported on changes in the their interactions with other members and changes they had made to their collections and playlists. The menus allowed a user to view the recommendations that they had received, the number of recos they had sent, how many new Blurb messages and replies had been sent, the members who they followed, and the members who had decided to follow them, their current collection contents, their current Playlists.
If there were changes in any of these categories ( a new reco had been sent, a member had responded to a reco, a new Blurb had been received, new tracks had been purchased, a gift had been sent) a number would be reported next to the category name to let the member know about the number of changes that had been made to that category since the last time they checked. This mechanism allowed the member to monitor changes in a number of different categories at once.
I've probably gone on at too much length and in too much detail about Lala's design and engineering, but I see no evidence that the software press ever managed to notice the ferment and great activity that was happening within the confines of the Lala site, or the design that enabled this to happen. I document this in detail because others who were compensated to discover that this kind of activity was going on must have dropped the ball.
Lala was, and for two more weeks, still is a valuable site to its members, who continue to use it to learn about new music there. Music that is unknown continues to find its natural champions, who still, in reduced numbers, teach others about its virtues.
It does look as though many of the exiled communities of Lala members are taking refuge in the MOG music site, a site that is not as well developed for music sharing as Lala but still has some of its flavor.
Unfortunately, the prods have been come out, the victim has been forced into the stanchion, and the long knives are drawn. Sometime during the last hour of May 31st, the Lala site, waiting for butchery, will be put down, and its collective store of organized musical knowledge will bleed out and be lost in the dust. What a shame!
Please join our community at SongTrellis. Our contributors welcome your comments, suggestions and requests. As soon as you join the site (or login if you are a member) a response form will appear here.