This year’s Reith Lectures, a fascinating annual series of talks presented on BBC Radio 4, are entitled “In the Beginning was Sound” and given by distinguished musician & composer Daniel Barenboim. The first lecture of the series is available now as an MP3 podcast from here or via the RSS feed here. (As far as I’m aware they keep each one online for a week so grab it while you can, or use the RSS feed to snag it automatically.)

Here’s the schedule for the next episodes:

1. 7 April 2006 – In the Beginning was Sound
2. 14 April 2006 – The Neglected Sense
3. 21 April 2006 – The Magic of Music
4. 28 April 2006 – Meeting in Music
5. 5 May 2006 – The Power of Music

“A new startup plans to announce a CD-swapping service today that tries to find a middle ground between ripping off music and paying full price for it. La la Media will announce its own online swap shop, where consumers can find discs and arrange for trades with other members online. The service will use prepaid envelopes (like Netflix) for sending the discs through the mail, and will charge users $1.49 per swap, with a dollar going to La la Media and the rest set aside to cover shipping. Sounds like a cheap way to build up your music collection, right?” – ArsTechnica.com

$1.49USD / 85p each to swap a load of CDs that you don’t listen to for ones that you want? That sounds like a damn good idea to me. The key issue, which Ars as always succinctly point out, is that traders are unlikely to get rid of the music off their iPods or PCs, so LaLa.com‘s service is bound to attract the attention of the dreaded RIAA. They offering 20% of their profits as fund to artists, even though they have no obligation, perhaps in an attempt to stave off the industry lawsuits which may well appear.

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