Lala.com relaunches, rocks

Yesterday online music website Lala.com did what all music sites eventually do, sometimes three or four times: It relaunched with a whole new service and business model. And after spending a day with it, I'm happy to report that it's probably the best web-based music service going right now.

Here's the pitch. Listen to any song in the Lala library one time, for free. If you want to listen to it again, put it in your "collection" and you can listen to it again as many times as you'd like. You get 50 free credits for your collection when you sign up. After that, adding songs to the collection costs you a dime each. You can also upload tracks you already own to your collection for free so you can play them again through Lala without spending that dime: The Lala Music Mover app scans your library and matches tracks on the service with those already on your drive, then manually uploads the ones it can't match... after hours of scanning and matching I've now I've got thousands of songs in my Lala library. (Tip: Let Music Mover run overnight!)

Now that's all just for playing songs via the lala.com website. Lala also sells songs for download in MP3 format. Most are 89 cents each, some 79 cents, they're all encoded at 256kbps, and none have DRM, making Lala.com the best deal going for downloadable music right now. Selection is awfully good (6 millions songs total are on the service), better than most online services, at least for the kind of music I listen to (Tuvan throat singing, if you must know).

And that's Lala. While I initially thought it would be a lot like Last.fm (which is still a good site), Lala has already proven itself to be substantially better and more useful to me. The stream-one-song-in-full deal is a real hit. Last lets you stream each track three times, but too many tracks on Last are still limited to 30 second clips, which seems to be less of a problem on Lala. Navigating Lala is also a breeze: Pages load quickly and songs play almost immediately. Again with Last, I'm constantly lost in the interface, which is heavy on its social networking component, and the buffering can be interminable. The ability to download tracks at Lala -- and so cheaply -- is just icing on the cake.

Try it out!