Lala.com will shut down at the end of the month. There was understandably lots of talk yesterday about what the closing of the site meant for users, but, with the exception of this AV Club story, I didn't see anything about the effect on music bloggers and similar sites.
I had wanted to start SftD for a long time, and it was Lala's combination of track embeds, ease of use, the large and legal catalog, and reasonable restrictions—a genuine sample-before-you-buy model—that made it possible. Pitchfork was an early adopter clearly seeing all of these advantages and I've been seeing the service pop up more and more on music blogs recently.
Apple seems likely to integrate some of Lala's feature into iTunes (or a new service), hopefully the track embeds will continue. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see what a site like Pitchfork—Lala's top "influencer"—does. (And wouldn't it would be great if Apple's new service includes some legacy links for the old embeds so that I don't have to rebuild the last six months of posts?)
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