Archive for: June 2007

To get the USB drive you have to be a member of Bob Marley Passport Club for $45 a year, the USB drive comes with the entire Exodus album, three video of 1977 performance at London’s Rainbow Theatre, and an exclusive carrying case and lanyard for the drive. You’ll have to act fast to get one, only 4000 available.

This new service will find music stored on your PC’s hard drive and make it available online on a “digital locker”. If Lala already has the same songs on its servers, then lala’s version is used. It’s like iTunes, but on the web. You can create Playlists and manage it, and your iPods can be sync directly from the site.

Similar services have been introduced before, but nothing quite like this. MP3.com tried out the “digital locker” concept in the past but was promptly sued by labels and lost. Lala, which is in talks with all the major labels, doesn’t believe that this will be a problem, in part because it plans on paying the labels so much in order to stream full versions of their songs (though it won’t pay for the “digital locker” versions of tracks that consumers already own). The reincarnation of Napster also offered free streaming of its catalog, with the caveat that no song can be listened to more than five times in a single month. Napster was also selling subscriptions to music, not music itself, and Lala believes that ownership, lack of DRM, and iPod integration make them different.

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