Would You Rent a Song For a Dime?

An anonymous reader writes "What's worse than a padlocking every song so that they will only play on certain devices? How about selling (renting) you songs that work on no devices? Astonishingly, this is what the music industry thinks we need. Warner Music is spending $20 million to back Lala, a startup devising a service to convince people to 'buy' 'web songs' for 10 cents each; these are then kept for safekeeping only by Lala with no download privileges. Industry insider Michael Robertson leaks the facts on this scheme, along with a seekrit URL so you can try it out."

Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would rent a song for a dime if you would lick my balls for a quarter.

Harrumph

[RollingThunder]

Music Search: nerdcore

Sorry, no matches for you.

Sorry, no business for you.

Re:Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

[moderatorrater]

It's easier than what the RIAA makes us do for two and a half songs.

Re:Imaginary Property

[QRDeNameland]

As long as it's an imaginary ten cents...

(cue piano music)

[jd]

Imagine there's no Lala,

And paying for is to buy.
No Warner below us,
Above us, metro wi-fi
Imagine all the artists
Getting paid the full amount.

Imagine there's no IP
Nor music tax for you
Nothng to lawsuit over
And no Sony too
Imagine all the people
Owning what they have

You may say I'm unAmerican
And your lawyer's just begun
I hope someday you'll .torrent
And the world will be as one.

Re:Lala sounded familiar...

[flaming error]

> I thought I had heard of Lala before.

Me too. And if TimeWarner is listening, I have a startup that needs funding. We're calling it Tinky Winky.

Re:Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 cents might be more like 1 cent if the banks guess correctly [abc.net.au]. There might be a sudden growth in the ball licking business in teh US soonish.

No men without hats

[zakezuke]

But they have Men without Pants [lala.com]

Re:(cue piano music)

[willyhill]

Completely offtopic here, but the other day I overheard the 14-year old daughter of a friend of mine remarking on what a beautiful song David Archuleta had written to sing in American Idol, and how he should have, like, totally won the competition if only for that.

I excused myself, went to the bathroom upstairs and laughed uncontrollably into a towel (to muffle the sound) for about five minutes.

*laughs*

[OMNIpotusCOM]

I wish I had mod points for you two. For $0.10 apiece you can pretend I modded you up.

Re:(cue piano music)

[AtariKee]

These are the kids that will be running the country soon. I would have suffocated myself.

Re:*laughs*

[mrbluze]

I wish I had mod points for you two. For $0.10 apiece you can pretend I modded you up.

Mod Point Rule #1: The Mod Point Fairy only gives you mod points when you don't want them.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:(cue piano music)

[Anonymous Coward]

These are the kids that will be running the country soon. I would have suffocated myself.

Just think the kids running the country now said "George Michael isn't gay"

Zis is verry funny!

[antek9]

Def.: the Slashdot Effect: Look here, a secret URL [lala.com] I just found, but shhh, don't go there and don't tell anyone!

One Question for Miss Morissette: Slashdotting a music service that is essentially nothing but a denial of service (a.k.a. sham), which effectively puts it out of service for a while, is that

a.) ironic, or

b.) a self-fulfilling prophesy?

Re:Mod point fairy

[mrbluze]

I just got hit with redundant for talking about CowboyNeal's taint on another story.

I would mod you up as underrated but mod fairy rule #1 applies.

Re:Imaginary Property

[Tony Hoyle]

Is that what you buy cheap french cars with?

Re:Eh?

[shark72]

"too bad it's not a dime to rent it for say, a month or something like that. Or to just have unlimited access to it."

The writeup states that the dime allows you to listen to it for an unlimited amount of times.

I did a quick bit of analysis. I presently subscribe to Rhapsody for $14 a month. I have about 200 tracks in my Rhapsody library. To rent these tracks via lala for a year (or any arbitrary time) would cost $20 for the year, vs. the $14 per month for Rhapsody.

Rhapsody and lala do not compare directly. Rhapsody allows for downloading to an MP3 player; this is a non-issue for me because I use Rhapsody exclusively on my Squeezebox Duet.

"There are a lot of people complaining in this article about that they just don't like it or are against the entire idea. How about some more people with ideas on how to make it work for you?"

The average Slashdotter will insist on nothing less than uncompressed FLAC files for ten cents each, plus a pony. It's also common for us to swear up and down that this is economically feasible; we just know it. Although this is utterly common sense to your typical Slashdotter, nobody has yet stepped up to actually do it.

Re:Imaginary Property

[anexkahn]

Will they accept my World of Warcraft currency?

Re:Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

[jaguth]

1) Lick Balls
2) ??????????
3) Profit!

Re:Would you lick my balls for a quarter?

[phat_cartman]

Once I ate 5 pennies, and shit a nickel.

Re:Zis is verry funny!

[cjb658]

Slashdotting a music service that is essentially nothing but a denial of service (a.k.a. sham), which effectively puts it out of service for a while.

Click Here! [riaa.org]

Re:Mod point fairy

[OMNIpotusCOM]

I actually just have my base set so low so that I can read almost everything, so maybe you can't ignore overrated. I figured out pretty early on that there's so few posts that are actually trolls and flamebait that it's not even worth ignoring them. Nope, the mods mostly just use their points to get back at you for something, to try to squelch you out of view because they don't agree with what you have to say, or can't rub two words together to save their life and mod down is how they argue. Often times it's the modded down posts that are worth reading.

The only reason I'm posting this is because I actually enjoy watching people bicker over what rating my posts deserve. My first one has gone from -1 to 5 in the span of an hour or so, and my others have gone from funny to troll... it's just amazing to watch when you have very little else to do =)

Re:Zis is verry funny!

[Opportunist]

Oh c'mon, do you have to spit into the soup? That site will never have that much traffic in its lifetime again.

Re:Imaginary Property

[Phybersyk0]

Quote:
topherhenk said:
"So you can listen to it online as much as you want for $0.10, you just can't take it with you."
Heh, says you. Creative Labs SoundBlaster Audigy ZS2 "What-U-Hear" Recording controls say differently. i gotz mp3's now bitchez!!!!

Re:(cue piano music)

[MadMidnightBomber]

You haven't really experienced "Imagine" until you've heard it in the original Klingon.

Re:Sshhh don't tell anybody about this

[mapkinase]

It's already storage of choice in Cyrillic social networks...