Trade Your CDs for A Dollar

If you can't find the music you want on iTunes or Tower Records, head on over to lala.com after July 4 to search what may eventually be "the largest record store in the world" with almost 1.8 million albums available for trade. For a dollar, lala members can post what CDs they want and what CDs they are willing to trade them for. If a CD is not available for trade, members will have an option to download a full-length album or buy the CD new. Prepaid envelopes provided by lala are used to facilitate CD swaps. Sounds pretty simple, unless you're not a big fan of mailing things out.

In this digital age where music is easy to copy from CDs, you gotta wonder if trading your old CDs for new ones is even legal. I was surprised to know that it has always has been legal to trade music without payment of additional royalties to the copyright holder. In this case, although musicians don't have to be compensated, lala is setting aside 20 percent of trading revenues for musicians. The company asks one thing from traders, to do "the right thing" by destroying or removing songs from their PCs and iPods once they agree to send the CD to another member.

The name is not an acronym, but the first words uttered by one of the founder's son. That's the kind of company lala is. A company that wants to form a grassroots community for it's customers while doing the right thing for music.