LaLa.com stalls its free music offering
Lala.com, the quirky Palo Alto, Calif. company which launched an ambitious free music service last month with great fanfare, has stalled on delivering the program.
The offer had always seemed too good to be true: Lala said it would stream all sorts of music to users for free (see our coverage here; scroll down), and that it would spend a whopping $140 million to afford it. The idea was that users would enjoy music enough to want to buy it.
Lala says it still plans to offer the service, but says a decision to delay was made because of heavy demand on its servers and a music catalog that isn’t impressive enough yet to meet users’ expectations.
Lala has raised $14 million in two round of funding. The company has swung wildly from business model to business model, so this latest episode isn’t surprising.
We contacted the company last week, when reports of the delay emerged, but it failed to respond. The WSJ (subscription required) has since confirmed the delay.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
