lala's last 31 days :: day 31 /rhapsody in the lead/

Elton John via last.fm

On what is presumably the last day for lala, I'm looking at the streaming alternatives. To compare, I'll do the John Adams test i.e. the number of John Adams albums at various sites:

• 61 Rhapsody 
• 31 lala 
• 28 Napster 
• 17 MOG - Give or take; presumably since I haven't subscribed yet, I can't get a definitive artist listing. And here's what may be my one and only mog from three years ago.
• 10 Grooveshark - Again, give or take. Not all albums are complete and the results are mixed in with the multitude of other John Adams as well as Oleta Adams singing the music of Elton John.
• 4 BlueBeat
• ??? hype machine - The results are jumbled, to say the least. This site is good for finding Radiohead cover versions and remixes, however.
• ??? YouTube - Even more jumbled results.
• 0 iTunes - No streaming, at least so far, by the acquirer of lala. They are graciously granting iTunes credit for all purchased web tracks.

Comments

[thebigfunk]

I've enjoyed your countdown to Lala's end... if I remember right, it was your blog that led me to lala in the first place.

I've been testing MOG out and went ahead and purchased a subscription. I find it less navigable than lala for classical music - and, to some degree, for all genres - but the catalog has been pretty strong overall. Unfortunately, the social network aspect of lala is not nearly as immediate or accessible on mog... I'm convinced this is primarily due to the way pages are structured rather than any actual deficiency in content.

I initially used lala to discover new music, quickly found it useful for listening to much of my collection, and soon shifted over to using primarily lala (rather than any other service *or* my cds). While MOG seems to be a possible substitute... so far, it's coming up a bit short. Still, for the price (which I think is exceptionally low), it's doing what it needs to do (until it improves or something better comes along).