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Tuesday, March 07, 2006 6:00 AM PT Posted by Harry McCracken
Get Into a New Music Service's Private Beta
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La La is, ultimately, a community of music lovers who have used the service to publish lists of the CDs they have and the CDs they want. If another La La user wants a CD you have, you can choose to send that person the disc, using a mailer provided by La La. Doing so gets you one credit which you can apply--along with $1 paid to La La--to get a CD on your want list from another La La user. In other words, for each used CD you get, you give up one of your own CDs plus a buck.
But La La is quite a bit more than a CD trading site. It's also going to sell music downloads (entire albums, not single songs), and it says that it's figured out how to sell albums that are copy-protected with Microsoft's DRM technology but which can be downloaded to an iPod--which will be a neat trick, since Apple is the only company that currently sells copy-protected tunes which will play on its music players.
La La also has a lot of neat-looking features for talking about music, finding new music you might like, and generally being a happy, social music lover--including tools to let you blog, browse through other users' collections, and get recommendations based on your music collection.
And the La La site is slick and innovative in a bunch of ways. For instance, it's got one seach field for artists, albums, and songs...and that search field has type-ahead for artists, so it displays a list of possibilities as you type.
La La looks like fun, and the only thing I've seen that's even vaguely similar in concept is Peerflix, a DVD-trading service. It does introduce an interesting question: Is it both legal and ethical to buy a CD, rip it to your computer, and then trade it to someone else, who will presumably do the same--and then maybe trade the CD to yet another person who will rip it and then pass it on? (If most La La users keep the music but trade the CD, the service will be a sort of Kazaa with a built-in throttling factor, since the music will travel via snail mail, rather than directly from one hard drive to another.)
The trading and selling of used CDs is unquestionably legal. I'm still sorting out in my mind, however, whether making a copy of a CD and then trading away the original is a moral act, even if it's a legal one.
Of course, La La has deals with music labels to sell downloads, and it says its selection will be comparable with those of the big download services; that suggests that the music companies can live with its business model. And it says it's going to give money to artists, which might help assuage your guilt if you end up buying fewer new CDs because you belong to La La.
Me, I still like having CDs of the music I really like; if nothing else, they're about as dependable as backups get. So if I ended up being a La La regular, I'd probably use it to get rid of music I had no intention of listening to again. Maybe others who use La La will feel the same. That seems perfectly ethical.
OK, back to that special offer for PC World readers: The first 1,000 folks who go to this link can get into La La's beta trial. If you try the service out, have fun--and let us know what you think.
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Unfortunetly the unscrupulous like the entire Kazaa outfit hijack great technologies like this and lead countless millions into infringing the rights of others. That sort of outrageous infringement makes me very suspicious of these new "business models".
This might be legal, but from a purely economic standpoint, it's idiotic. The physical disc is worthless except for its content--and that content can be shipped for free, bypassing the monetary and environmental costs of paying to put it on a truck and shipping it from place to place.
I suppose that's the cost of a largely pre-digital copyright code mandated by business interests.
I think this site is a great idea and I have subscribed. I have already sold a cd and I am waiting to get a new one. This is awesome because I have a ton of cds I hate that other people like.
Peerflix rocks. I like the concept as it applies to DVDs.
I hope they will go live soon! I didn't get in for free, the beta was closed again.
When I lived in Germany I used a similar service, Hitflip. It worked really well. I need to try out Peerflix here.
I wonder why la la is being hyped like this. Of course, $ 9 mn funding will help them get traction in the market, but the service isn't new. There are some in the US (peerflix) and Germany (Hitflip)
it is a pretty cool idea and i look ofrward to using it soon!
why doesn't anyone just do a netflix thing with CDs? i mean you pay 10 bucks a month for an unlimited amount of cd's, they ship 'em, you rip 'em and return them in a postage paid envelope. (darn it! just gave away a million dollar idea!)
how do you know that the cd you are getting from a stranger is even playable? it could be scratched to death!
The next logical step is for LaLa to sell CDs which they retain for the owner's convenience and security. Owners could then be provided access to their CD via the net so they can legally download an MP3 encoded copy of whatever songs they choose. If the owner wishes to sell only ownership need be transferred. Of course an owner could take physical possession of a disk at any time by simply requesting delivery and paying a charge for this extra service. A truly complex legal situation is looming and it may require a whole new definition of ownership to resolve it.
It is a wonderful idea. This is a new revolution which is going to be the way of the future for consumers to shop. Besides, I don't want to pay high priced retail dollars. There are so many of these online shops popping up..another is book trading for book lovers on line bookinsdotcom, books are free, etc...great ideas and im all up to use them!
AHAHAHA, the RIAA is going to have kittens.
Stuffopolis.com and mediachest.com are better sites and have done it without gobs of funding.
I would like to add SwitchDiscs.com to the list of better sites and its free unlike this lala site. what kind of name is that anyway?
Zunafish.com lets one trade DVD's, CD's, videogames, paperbacks, vhs tapes, and audiobooks for $1 per trade.
Did anybody mention that lala.com intends to pay the artists 20% of its proceeds? So far lala.com has worked flawlessly for me. I'm tired of the audio industry's nasty practice of new formats (LP, cassette, CD) and extended versions with additional songs and the need to replace entire albums just to get a few songs you want to hear again and again in the highest quality format. I hate having to buy a recording more than once. LaLa.com offers a good, totally legal alternative. Most folks include the back cover and booklet along with the CDs -- so I suspect most intend to keep the CDs they receive via trade. And since so many are hard to find in stores, LaLa.com is a great source of obscure CDs. This is not like trading books, a field where most books sell only 3,000 copies. In the music industry, a flop sells 10,000 copies. In the book industry, 10,000 sales is a top seller (only about 200 books a year sell over 100,000 copies).