“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.
The Register also has a good overview, including a walkthrough of the experience and their opinion on the flaws, the biggest being that you only trade the CD itself. That’s right, there’s no room in LaLa’s trading mailer envelope for the CD booklet artwork, or the under-tray/back cover, for that matter. This does seem extremely odd, in that you’ll then have a load of empty jewel cases with artwork and sleeves, which you’ll probably find hard to throw away. (I know I have, I’ve got still got a full set of empty Chemical Brothers album cases back from when I leant the lot to someone at university.)
I think they’re relying on what most people do these days when they buy a CD: rip it to iTunes/Windows Media Player and then store the CD never to see it again. In many ways I understand this, as I pretty much do it myself (though I do make a point of checking out the artwork thoroughly before I box the CD) but it does leave a slightly empty feeling, much like when mainstream 12″ vinyl died and along with it the big & beautiful cover art. Maybe they’ll come around and provide an option to send the art too, we will see.
Still, one of the things I really like about CDs, regardless of the artwork, is that I’ve got a relatively durable, long lasting, high quality, mostly unencumbered by DRM physical medium that I can fall back on should I lose my digital music collection (through say, a dead hard-disk) or want to re-rip at higher/lossless quality. These are the reasons why I still don’t buy downloads: you don’t get anything real; nothing you can hold in your hands. Yes, you can burn it to CDR but CDRs have a very limited life in comparison to proper “silvers” when it comes to archiving, some say as little as 5 years, and I’d like to know that I still have my CD collection in 20 years time, thanks very much. The DRM issues are worrying, in that companies can arbitrarily degrades your rights at any point in the future, as Apple proved in a previous iTunes update that downgraded the user rights of its FairPlay DRM. (yes, the name’s doublespeak at its finest.) The step backwards in quality is another one, and while some people go with the “good enough” argument I just don’t buy it, I want my audio to be 44.1KHz 16bit and non-lossy, dammit! LaLa.com give you all those advantages back simply by giving you the CD.
Even with the lack of artwork I can see this being a popular service, something that combines the social networking of MySpace with the commerce aspects of eBay; it’s purported to be addictive. LaLa.com is effectively filesharing with a legitimising token — the CD itself — and raises some interesting questions with regards to the value of CDs, as the major labels have always hated the second-hand market: they want you to buy everything new from them, and new every time the format changes. It’s a great idea and I’m amazed no-one’s thought of it before; here’s hoping they avoid/win litigation from the music industry and that their UK store opens soon!