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.