Following the long and proud tradition of burning a mix-CD (or mix-tapes for those of you who lived through the 90s) for your crush to express your intense feeling through nothing but power ballads, a new messaging app, whimsically named “La-La”, is enabling it users to send song snippets—and song snippets only—to each other. So far, it features a decent selection of licensed music by mainstream artists. But if you want to send an obscure indie-rock gem to that cute hipster you know, the musical messaging app also lets you to browse through YouTube to clip out an audio for sending.
In the larger picture, this could be seen as the newest development in messaging apps’ continuous effort to differentiate their products. Marrying music sharing with OTT messaging seems like a good idea in theory, but how to further integrate the music industry into the mobile messaging ecosystem remains unclear. Given the positive responses that previous efforts such as Yo or Tango received, however, it is certainly interesting to see if such creative approaches could catch the fickle eyes of younger generations.
