Lala.com Launches With Streaming Music and Your Photostream

Lala.com Ryan Adams Artist Page
Photo: via TheModernAge.org via Lala.com

You may recall that it was recently revealed that Warner Music pumped $20 million into Lala.com and the site relaunched on Tuesday (Oct 21) with DRM free downloads and 10 cent music streams. Oh yeah, and one more thing, the new site launched with thousands of pictures taken from Flickr.com without the permission of many (and quite possibly all) of the copyright holders. The Modern Age found a few of her photos on the new Lala.com and here’s what she had to say to about it in an email:

This relaunched music streaming website, Lala.com, has $35 million dollars in VC money and is even partly backed by Warner Music Group. What’s the problem? Their entire site is made up of photos LIFTED FROM FLICKR. For myself they stole my Ryan Adams and Fratellis photos–downloading them, recropping and resizing them, and cuttting out my watermark.

I usually don’t mind people using my photos, if they ask my permission and give me photo credit, but they have done neither. AND they are a real BUSINESS making real MONEY off of this site (they have license agreements with every major recording label and 150,000 independent record companies), yet they can’t seem to find enough money (or sense) to contact photographers about using their work.

UPDATE: Well, it seems that someone at Lala.com hit the panic button today because late this afternoon (Oct 30) all the non-licensed photos were blacked out and tonight all the “Source” links back to Flickr.com were removed.