Peerflix is very much like lala.com (Read more about lala.com here) but rather then trading CDs, you trade DVDs. Users sign up and are able to trade their DVDs for DVDs that they want. The more DVDs that you send to others, the more flixbuxs that you a…

I just received my first CD that I ordered at lala.com. The CD was Gun N’ Roses, G N R Lies. When I received the CD I expected to received a old, scratched, and heavily used CD, instead I received a almost brand new music CD for a little over a ….

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]

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

While it was still running, it worked pretty well. I did about a half-dozen swaps on it.

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.