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Earlier we have covered 20+ places to listen to music for FREE.  If you haven’t read that article, I would recommend you to read it first and then come back here.

Anyway, in this article we are reviewing one of those services into detail.  It turns out that Lala is one of the best services when it comes to online music.  Lala has millions of high quality songs which you can listen to for FREE at least once.  And if you want you can buy them as mp3 to download on your computer.

Other than that you may also add the ‘Web Song’ in your online Lala library if you don’t want to download on your computer and save some money.  Though web songs are cheaper than the mp3 songs, yet you can play those songs on Lala only.  So if you want to be able to play them on every device you have, consider buying the mp3 version.

Lala – Where Music Plays

Anyone without even an account on Lala can listen to all the available songs.  You can share your library with your friends through email, Twitter or Facebook.  Lala provides a cool widget that gets embedded on Facebook and on blogs when shared, visitors can listen to the shared songs right there.  They don’t even have to visit Lala to listen to the songs you shared.

To start with, you don’t even have to create an account on Lala.  Just link your Facebook account with Lala and get started.  Fill in your username if required.  That’s it.  You are registered on Lala.  When you again visit Lala, just click Facebook connect button to login again.

After you are logged in, you can just search for any artist, album or song title.  As soon as you find the required artist, album etc., Lala will list all the relevant songs and albums.  You can either play to all the songs from that artist or just some albums – it’s up to you.

You can also search by Genres.  If you want to listen to all Bollywood songs available on Lala – browse to this link: http://www.lala.com/#browse/genre/World_Music/Indian and then filter it further as per your taste.  Similarly you can search for any specific genre like Bhangra, Pop, Indian, Indian Classical, World, Soundtracks etc etc..

You can either add your search results to your Lala Queue or click on the little Blue play button to start playing it right there.  You may also listen to the complete album at once.  Just click on the song name in the top web player to go to the album it belongs to and then click on ‘Play album’ button.

Now if you notice on the right, there are two links (as explained further)

1. Buy web songs – Buy all web songs in the album view, or specific song.  Web songs are generally $0.10 cheaper than the mp3 version.  But you can play them only in online Lala library.
2. Buy MP3 files – They are regular MP3 songs which you have on your computer.  When you buy mp3 files, then will be downloaded to your computer which you can play anytime on any device.

So it is up to you what you want to do with the song you are listening to.  If you just want to listen to it only once, that’s fine too.  You can listen to any album (recently released or old) at least once for its entire length.  If you don’t buy web or mp3 songs, you will be able to listen to only 0:30 sec clips of these next time you try to listen to.

But this concept is very useful because now you can listen to any album first before you even buy it and see if you really want to buy it.  Really cool.. right.  Who gives you a second chance??? Huh…

So go and listen to the latest released albums from Rihanna, Lady GaGa, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Usher or anyone else.

You can also listen to the songs your friends and followers are playing.  Check out what others are listening to these days.

Lala Music Mover:

Lala Music Mover is a piece of software which searches your existing collection on your computer and tries to match them with the songs available on Lala.  Lala doesn’t upload any song from your library.

So your entire collection may become available on Lala online library if they are properly tagged and properly named.  If you are missing some of the file information, then they may not become available even though it is available on your computer.  But in any case, Lala Music mover will try to match the songs online.  Lala could match around 1000 songs with the collection on my computer.

I personally have become a fan of Lala and in fact sometimes prefer it over Pandora and Last.fm.  Though they have some other interesting features. (Which will be covered in a future post)  Recently Apple has bought Lala and probably we will see some more innovation on Lala soon.  Also when you Google for any album, the links you get in the search result are from Lala only.

Go try Lala yourself.  I am sure you will love it the same way I do.  And below you can listen to the songs I like on Lala.  Join my online Lala library here..

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 11:31 AM and is filed under Review, Social Networking, Technology, Tips and Tricks, Web Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.