“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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Richard Stallman dismisses Creative Commons:

Stallman does have some interesting things to say about Creative Commons, the open license for content that bloggers love to talk about, but don’t love to adopt. Creative Commons is a powerful idea, and an interesting non-profit organization. It’s also rejected by Stallman, though the reasons may surprise you.

(For those of you who don’t know who he is, see Stallman’s wikipedia entry.)

Interesting article with regards to Creative Commons, in that he points out its biggest single flaw — that people tend to see it as a single licence — while acknowledging its flexible capabilities. Then he goes on to dismiss it entirely, but that’s pretty much expected for RMS, free software extremist that he is.

Creative Commons is an interesting concept: basically they believe that our current copyright laws are fundamentally broken thanks to successive lobbying, time extensions and “hamonisation”. (UK & IoM is now author’s death + 70 years for audio.) As a result, they propose a flexible licencing system to allow content creators to “give back” some rights, such as the ability to legally freely share the content with friends, sample/create derivative works, etc.

We’re thinking of releasing some of our artists’ work under Creative Commons, possibly the Sampling or Share Music licences, and have discussed it at a few meetings. It’s early days yet, and these things always take ages to agree on, but everyone recognises that it has potential. We’d appreciate any comments that anyone has — what do you think?

Got an e-mail from Christy & Dave from Running Media telling us they’ve got their online music store up and ready selling downloads for a decent price with a very fair artist cut. They’ve done a great job; it’s a little sparse at the moment but I’m sure that’ll change soon, with several artists in the pipeline for putting up material.

They’ve also got a bit of a coup promotion wise: the address for their website is printed on every single copy of new artist Corinne Bailey Rae‘s singles and albums as Bob from Running Media is her manager — her album just came out on Monday, with the single out last week and right into the charts at an amazing number 2, only pipped to the post by the queen of pop Madonna!

Don’t know if it’s quite in “big launch” mode yet, but it’s well worth a look, they’ve got a good coverage of Manx artists — mostly from their own Stereoscout label — and we’ll put a few of our artists up there too with a bit of luck! Good work Christy & Dave & Bob!