The WSJ covers the recent announcement by lala.com that they will stream music for free via browswers and sell albums only if you want to load songs onto your iPod:

It’s like a subscription music service, but without the monthly subscription fee. Lala is betting that in return for getting all that free access to music at home, listeners will pay to buy the songs they want to take with them on iPods and other music players. The prices will range from $6.50 to $13.50 for an album. (For now, Lala plans to sell music only by the album rather than song by song.)

Entering the online digital music sales fray is not big news. What is big news however, is that unlike all other digital music shops, Lala has reverse engineered some of Apple’s iPod technology and found a way to load their music onto iPods without having to use iTunes!

The risks include enabling Lala customers to circumvent the proprietary iTunes software. That may be viewed by Apple as a provocation. Spokespeople for Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The WSJ analysis is rather rosy but we feel that with Apple’s history of frequent updates to iPod and iTunes software that its only a couple of weeks before they release an ‘update’ that completely disables Lala’s technology. Let the rat race begin!