Lala, a digital music service, has a new approach to selling music. Consumers will a pay a dime to stream a song, then if you decide buy the song, it will cost .79 cents ( or 89 cents if you never paid dime to stream the song).

Lala is forgoing advertising entirely and is attempting to make money by selling music only. The CEO of Lala criticizes Myspace and Imeem and other sites that force advertising on users which offers a poor listening experience.

To illustrate, advertising based sites want to give away music in return for ‘eyeballs’, yet the music business continues to shrink and the advertising market is growing larger. These ad supported sites are not financial winners, so it’s just a matter of time when this model collapses and companies stop spending money on advertising. I seriously wonder how these ad supported sites (Myspace) will evolve in the future.

No one really knows if Lala’s new approach will connect to consumers. For instance, why pay 10 cents for a stream when one can pony up $10-15 a month for Rhapsody that allows users to stream and unlimited amount of music? Also, how do artists get paid, do they at least make a penny?

Also, I’m not sure if the regular consumer will grasp the concept of paying for a stream. It seems iTunes and Amazon’s ‘stream, click and buy approach’ is the most conventional. At least Lala threw away the ad supported model. As Business Week says, Lala is trying an approach that’s all about selling music. Not iPods, and not ads. Just music.