Palo Alto based lala made a splash by announcing their landing page on USA Today. Lala is a new service, set to launch this summer, that allows people to swap physical CDs.
It looks to be exactly like Peerflix but for CDs. You will tell lala what music you have. Other members can request it from you, and you send it directly to them using a postage-prepaid envelope supplied by lala. They charge $1 for the swap, and $.20 goes directly to artists.
You aren’t supposed to send copies of CDs (originals only), and lala asks that you do the “right thing” and remove songs from your iPod or PC once you’ve sent a CD to another member. While I’m all for the revenue sharing with artists, pleeeease, lala, get over yourself and drop the condescending, do-the-right-thing-as-defined-by-the-RIAA messaging.
I have never written about Peerflix – I am a former member and was deluged in spam from the service and never found anything good on the site to request (people keep the good stuff and put little known movies into the service). My hope for lala is that they get much better inventory from users and don’t try to enforce the “no copies” rule too strongly. These will be very difficult things to do.
Obviously they won’t be able to *enforce* the no copies rule. And they aren’t being “condescending” with their attitude. They are doing what they have to do legally to stay out of hot water. Just like Napster and Kazaa, they have to say “don’t commit piracy,” but that doesn’t mean they really mean it.
But lala is different from Napster and Kaaza. They are ready to pay the artists for these “each copy” the users make.
Sad that this domain had to go to waste. Using the postal service to share music? Interesting… Maybe there is a market, but no one I know has CDs.
Heh…I used to think CD’s would go away, but then when you purchase music from a legit online music store, try to move that music to a new PC and find that some of that music is crippled because of DRM…even if your licenses are backed up…you quickly start to reconsider CD’s. I now buy CD’s, then rip them into my collection. The price may be slightly higher, but I now have a good backup. This thing, IMHO will take off big-time.
The discussion about CD’s reminds me of a previous TC blog entry about cassettes. Compact disc is following cassette into oblivion. The only CD’s I have are backup discs for my company stuff.
you should really check out neighbor ring – they were there before peerflix with a better model – use a social network and reputation ratings to show who trusts who – then actually borrow/lend stuff instead of trading. it works… and transactions are free!
Hmm, I like Peerflix, but that’s partially because I was able to get Meatballs on it – yep, odd child of the 70’s type movie. And, don’t seem to get SPAMmed from them.
Lala is interesting, but made me think of Peerflix too. And, well, I think I can count the number of CDs I own on my hands – I just like my music digital, even though I know the sound quality is less than optimal.
Even though I don’t think this is a viable business and it doesn’t solve anything for artists, I do think it’s a good alternative to buying DRMed music online. However I strongly believe the most technically capable people (for the most part) don’t give a shit about copyright infringment, and the less technically capable people are perfectly satisfied buying their music at Best Buy.
I´ve checked the beta yesterday.
The website is very fast und stable.
It´s great to meet people with same taste of music and trade CD´s, even if CD´s are not my favourite sound storage medium.
We´ll see….
This issue looks interesting to me alian-tique Japanese passing by articles to articles somehow, guys.
ルルルルルルルル〜…
If you’re looking to (ilegally) amass large collections of music then
BitTorrent blows away the USPS =)
This a bit like launching something designed for trading cassette tapes, a few years after CD’s had come out.
Netflix works because there has been no really easy way to get DVD quality movies reliably over the internet. For music, if you really can’t afford to buy CD’s, and don’t want to take the risk (viruses, malware, legal) of P2P, there are always sites like Allofmp3.com which are always going to be cheaper and less hassle than lala.
Lala looks interesting, but I take issue with the trollish title you’ve given this article. Let’s tone down the hyperbole, shall we?
so what happens if my collection of CDs get lost in the mail?
who pays for that??? who is responsible?
People still actually have CDs?
On a side note- I’m pretty sure this concept has been done before and failed everytime.
Scuse my skepticism, I think Lala is a great, successful, affordable, probably legal way to steal music, but the 20% “royalties” to artists are nothing but a feel good label slapped on a questionable enterprise.
Specifically:
Major artists (U2 Madonna) who hardly need the add’l $$ will be guaranteed revenue as the ownership/ reimburse path is clear.
What happens when Lala needs to compensate me 20 cents for the cd I recorded 7 yrs on an indie label no longer in business? Odds are that since I’m not U2 or Madonna I need the $ way more than they do and, ironically, I’m way less likely to ever see it.
Even supposing Lala is committed to helping the artist, in countless scenarios such as the one I describe here they’ll spend way more than my 20cents figuring out there’s no one to pay.
If you’re going to use Lala to save yourself $ that should go to the artist who created the music, fine. But don’t try to ease your conscience by saying that you’re “helping” the artist.
I don’t think this company was set up to promote legal music swapping. It was set up to make money from illegal music swapping. The best part about this service that I HATE about bittorrent is that you often wind up downloading incomplete CDs or the songs are all recorded at varying quality. Having a complete CD (in MP3 format on my hard drive) is key to me.
Of course Kelly. That’s painfully obvious. My point is that someone w/Bill Ngueyn’s ability, drive, track record etc, COULD aspire a LITTLE higher. He’s taken a simple business model that was waiting to happen and leveraged his reputation to get the financial backing to succeed @ this faster than anyone else.
BN doesn’t need the $ out of another wildly successful financial venture. He’s in a position moneywise and reputation-wise to try and build something that really works better for everyone involved, rather than just taking the easy route and tweaking the legality of filesharing.
On the other hand, maybe he’s neither as creative or motivated as one might imagine, and the easy route of maintaining the status quo and lining his pockets a bit more was preferable…
The guy I’d really like to hear from here is Bill N himself. Bill, if you’re reading this, any thoughts from you?
A CD swapping site? In 2006? I agree with the other commenters: Lala simply won’t work.
I think it will work for a certain demographic; people who don’t want to get involved in p2p, or who feel too guilty to engage in p2p piracy but feel more comfortable with the lala model, which is, behaviourly, much closer to acquiring music via a borrowed cd from a friend.
Feels like they’re late to the game. The market for physical audio is in decline and feels like teh recording industry are much better prepared than they were when napster hit the scene.
My prediction: This will be the first music sharing company to have a major lawsuit unrelated to music sharing. Coca Cola will certainly slam them for ripping off their logo…
Well, they can put all the anti-piracy stuff on the site they want; anyone that actually uses it is going to burn a copy of that CD before sending it.
Which, personally, I don’t see anything wrong with – how does the $.20 compare to what the artist got on the first sale under the RIAA?
What’s a CD?
I personally think they can and should try to enforce the no copies rule. They could do it via a feedback system and some user education.
Think about it.. I swap my original copy of a Buddy Guy CD for a Stevie Ray Vaughan CD that I find out upon receiving it is actually just a copy. I’d be a little ticked off. It’s mainly a quality issue for me.
First off how do I know where they copy is sourced from? Maybe its an exact 1:1 copy thats perfect or maybe its sourced from 128kbps mp3s or other less then perfect compressed source. Then I rip it again to put on my ipod and it’s compressed again this time using a compressed source to do so.
Fast forward 6 months after I’ve lost the CD that was sent to me via lala so I know burn a copy of my now twice compressed Stevie Ray Vaughan CD and trade it with someone else who could repeat what I just did.
Anyway.. I haven’t checked it out yet so maybe there is something like this already but I think it would be great if it included some kind of feedback system a la ebay for users to report on whether they were getting original CDs.
la la could frame it in a very positive way encouraging users to report feedback to ensure they and other users are only trading the highest quality CDs.
IIRC there was a web 1.0 company that did something very similar to this. It had some weird name that I can’t recall, and like all the others, folded because it couldn’t get anybody to pay for that which they had initially been given for free.
While it was still running, it worked pretty well. I did about a half-dozen swaps on it.
Sorry it took a while to come across the blog. It’s been a long week.
Let me begin by why we do CDs – 95% of all music is sold in the physical format today. The 5% includes all digital downloads and ringtone (which is more than half). Some quick math, 1B songs on iTunes/50M iPods means less than two CDs per iPod purchased.
This means the iPod is a greater container but no one is buying new music – that’s bad.
We used trading at $1 to encourage you to engage in new music again. Once you start listening to music again, we also sell new CDs and digital music.
Big ‘but’ for our digital music – Full albums only no singles. Singles are crappy for musicians.
Instead of iTunes quality, all digital from ‘la la’ will be in high fidelity including some in Dolby 5.1.
While we all love digital, we need to understand that not everyone has an iPod. It’s also a terrible experience hooking up an iPod to a car. I’ve tried everything from an iTrip to the Harmon solution – it sucked.
I’m going to take another healthy beating on this next issue. You should not keep digital files once you’ve sold/trade the CD.
Is ‘la la’ going to enforce this? We can’t. We can only encourage you by contributing 20% of our revenues.
Before you rip me a new one, keep in mind ‘la la’ makes about the same in net income to what we’re giving artists.
To others that tried trading before us or after us, good luck. The team at ‘la la’ includes the people that wrote the ebay search engine, started Yahoo! mail, created something called HTTP 1.1, and the first java servers.
That amazing search capability is enabling us to add 20k CDs a day. In a week of our beta, we’re larger than the entire category. That’s not saying much, but wait until summer.
When I started Onebox, people said unified messaging and VOIP was a joke and would never happen. 3.2M subscribers and $850M later, we changed a lot of minds.
Sign-up for ‘la la’ and engage me on the site. I’ll do everything I can to change your mind.
I’m pretty exhausted after this week but this dialogue inspires me to work even harder to create a music site you’ll enjoy.
Thanks again for the oppty.
bill
Eric said: “Which, personally, I don’t see anything wrong with…”
Personally, the problem I see is in considering this a consumer vs corporation issue. I don’t care whether the corporations lose money. I *do* care that framing this as a battle between two factions fighting over content misses another, long-term issue: the growing sense of entitlement among consumers and the eventual impact on creators outside the corporate system.
I’d like to see more people, especially in the Web 2.0 community who are probably closest to this, realize that as people become more empowered they need to have compelling reasons to create and to innovate. Intellectual property laws were introduced as a means to improve society and its culture. Just because it’s been hijacked by corporations in bed with politicians doing what they want because voters don’t really care, doesn’t make IP a bad idea. As Lessig said, free does not always work. And in an entitlement culture, consumers eventually lose as content quality and variety decline… replaced with risk-averse product intended for mass consumption.
For anyone who caught John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) on Jimmy Kimmel last night, you heard him tell the audience what the result is of institutionalized music. Let’s not “institutionalize” disrespectful behavior. If you don’t want to line corporate pockets, don’t buy their product. Don’t simply take it either since they can still make money from your attention (we all know they’re tracking downloads; may as well be tracking ads).
Don’t do this for corporations. Don’t do it for the artists. Do it for a future where we have high quality content in unlimited variety created by independent artists free from corporate control.
[/steps off soapbox]
You don’t have to wait anymore to be invited to lala.com You can go to http://www.lala...invite/usatoday and sign right up. I am already receiving two Gun N’ Roses albums! woo!
You should try Peerflix out again. The service has grown termendously in the past year and there are tons of good titles there…
Agree with Daniele. Peerflix is really good.
Does anyone know WHY lala has been down for two days? I was just getting started! The service rocks, by the way — well, when the site is up!
I have been an active member of lala for a few months now, and its one of the rare new services that you keep coming back too.. give it a try; its worth it.