Lala.com gets in tune with Facebook gift shop

"You will now be able to purchase songs as gifts for your friends," Facebook engineer Will Chen said in a blog post announcing enhancements to the website's gift shop.

The Lala-powered music service boasts a playlist of more than eight million tunes, which can be bought as a "Web songs" at a cost of one Facebook credit each.

Facebook credits are a currency for purchases at the social networking service, and a single credit costs about ten cents (US).

Web songs can be played as often as desired using a Lala mini-application, or widget, at Facebook or at the Lala.com website.

Facebook members can buy songs as MP3 downloads for 90 cents worth of credits. The music downloads can be listened to on an array of devices.

Lala hosts people's digital music collections onto the Internet, allowing access from varied locations, in what it describes as "music in the clouds."

Lala also provides an application that scans people's music iTunes music collections and then stocks their LaLa account libraries with the same songs on the premise that they have already been purchased.

"Basically, we turn any songs you have at home into Web songs," said John Kuch of Lala.

"That is free. If you already own it, it is already your track."

Lala has content deals with all the major record studios as well as independent labels and artists, according to Kuch.

"Work, home, or wherever, music should be a part of that experience," Kuch said.

"In Lala we are really bringing music into the cloud. LaLa is putting itself at a lot of different points where people want to access music."

Kuch declined to comment on a "Discover Music" press conference planned for Wednesday which is expected to focus on Google teaming with Lala and MySpace-owned iLike to launch a search service devoted to music.

(c) 2009 AFP