The future of the music industry

Forgot to blog this, from the November issue of Wired magazine: Free Music Now! Lala.com's Plan to Give Songs Away Could Upend the Industry. Excerpt:

Nguyen's complaint with the way music is sold online — whether it's CD purchases or downloads — is that there's no easy, legal way to listen to a song before you buy it. A 30-second snippet on Amazon.com or iTunes is rarely enough to form a good impression and certainly not enough to get a tune stuck in your head. Nguyen's solution: Give the music away. Later this year, his new company, Lala, will begin streaming any track or album the user selects, for free, betting that the chance to explore the sonic landscape will get listeners excited. As they take in artists and genres they might otherwise never hear, music fans are going to want to own the songs, Nguyen says — and Lala will be right there to make that possible, via whatever channel and format the customer prefers: downloading tracks, trading discs, or even (gasp) buying the CDs. It's a model he believes will revive the music industry.