Has LaLa.com just changed the online musical landscape? It’s quite possible they have. Tonight with the Warner Music Group, they’ve started rolling out their new service which will give anyone access to a huge collection of Warner songs – which the user can pick – streaming over the Internet – for free. If you like it, LaLa asks that you buy it, DRM-free.

It’s radio on-demand. You can start, stop, skip to the next track on an album (though you can’t pause). You can see all the information about a CD and one-click buy the physical CD or (eventually, not live yet) download it.

I’ve been playing around with it and I’ve got to say the full-song streams are awesome, but what is with the limited 30-second streams? If you’re going to hype up a service, do it the right way and make all the music on it available for full stream at any time, not just selected ones. It’s quite possible they are still rolling out all the music, I hope so because if that’s the case it’s simply awesome.

The UI could definitely use some work, but if they really do give you unlimited, streaming access to all of Warner’s Music collection, I’ll go to the site even if it looks like MySpace.

The site also seems to be having some major performance issues at the moment, though that may have to been expected when you announce a little thing like you’re going to allow anyone to listen to anything they want in the Warner catalog at any time over the Internet for free.

LaLa and Warner clearly have iTunes in their sights. They make it very known that they want you to use the service and sync it up with your iPod. When you download tracks, they even go right to your iPod.

But is the Warner Music Group just using LaLa to try and put some kind of dent in Apple’s iTunes armor? None of the labels like the fact that Steve Jobs can dictate terms to them using iTunes as leverage, and they’d all likely much rather see a service like LaLa, where they can set the price, rise to power.

Yes, Warner is allowing their music to be streamed for free – BUT LaLa is the one footing the bill. They have to pay Warner for each song streamed, only making money themselves when someone actually makes a purchase. Obviously this very risky for a startup – but big risk can also equal big reward. And as is noted in The New York Times article, “The fees for the streaming could be thought of as their customer acquisition cost.”

Meanwhile, seeing as Warner’s clearly is being outed as the next DRM-Free label, GigaOm wonders if we won’t be seeing iTunes Plus Warner tracks on iTunes as soon as tomorrow.