Access Your Music From Anywhere With Lala

Every now and again a Web site comes along that's genuinely useful in a "that's something I'd use daily" way. Lala.com is one of those sites.

Lala joins the crowded digital music space but it offers two things that I think really set it apart from the competition.

The first is music management. Once you've signed-up for an account, you can upload your entire music library to Lala. This can take a few hours but it means that you can access and play your music from any computer - which is a really useful feature.

The second is purchasing music. The majority of online music stores (like iTunes for example) charge users a flat fee to download music. The average price is about 99c per track.

Lala handles things a little differently by offering two tiers of purchasing. The first tier lets you download a track and listen to it whenever you're logged-in to your Lala account. However, you're prohibited from downloading the track to your hard-drive or from transferring it to an iPod or other device. This may sound somewhat restrictive but here's the sweetener - these "Web only" tunes only cost 10c per track. If you listen to most of your music at home, that's a great price to buy legal, fully licensed music.

If you prefer to "own" the track and have the freedom to do whatever you want with it (like transfer it to your iPod) you can still buy-it to download at a cost of 89c.

Each song in the Lala store offers both pricing tiers and when you sign-up for an account you'll receive 50 "Web only" songs for free.

One last feature that's also pretty cool. You can play the full version of any song in Lala once. This is a great "try before you buy" feature and runs rings around the 30 second preview you get in iTunes.

Check out the video above for a full walk-through.