Ever since the master strategists in Cupertino bought and (predictably) killed off the only genuine competitor to ever rise against iTunes, the question has hung like a pall over the online digital music marketplace: what will replace Lala?
Perhaps Jobsian worker bees are buzzing about as we speak, crafting an iTunes portal to allow users access to their digital music libraries from anywhere on the Internet, one which will sell them web-only versions of their favorite music for as little as one thin dime per cut.
Until that happy day dawns, or until some other independent outfit comes along to offer something as interesting and valuable as Lala was, one might consider checking out a newish Facebook mashup called Friends and Music.
It’s not without its drawbacks, such as uneven volume settings across playlists and a tendency of some cuts to end abruptly before the actual ending of the track, but Friends and Music does offer Facebook’s tens of millions of users a few interesting ways to discover and share music.
Using content from YouTube repurposed as playlists – a model successfully flown with YouTube’s approval for tha past five years by SonicSwap – Friends and Music mashes in meta data from companies such as LastFM, Billboard, LiveNation to give the app what San Francisco-based founder Andy Lammers calls “a very simple tool for people to listen to and discover music online.”
“No one has really cracked the nut on music and social media,” Lammers told us in describing the motivation behind Friend and Music, which began life just a few months ago as a fan page app for promoting live shows and artists in an area, to which his team “put as much content on there as possible including YouTube videos.”
With lots of feedback from users, the app has been rebuilt from scratch 3 times and continues to evolve. Lammers’ great hope is that people will not only come to use it as a primary source for finding and listening to music, but that they will use the app’s built-in playlist function and Facebook’s friendship connectivity to share music with one another.
