Filed under: Audio, Web services, Commercial, Social Software
la la: Trade music CDs for a dollar
Want some new CDs? Got some to get rid of? la la might be of some assistance. It's a web service that will hook you up with the CDs you want, in exchange for the CDs you want to rid yourself, and a dollar. It works like this: At the la la web site you enter the CDs you have and the CDs you want. When la la sees that you have a CD somebody else wants, and you agree to ship it, la la will send you prepaid mailing envelopes, and credit your account with one CD. Then, when la la sees that somebody else has a CD you want, they'll send it to you. While this might not seems like the best deal, consider how much money you're likely to get trading in your CDs at a used record store. While brand new albums are predictably rare on la la, if you're like me and constantly behind the curve when it comes to new music, or are constantly getting rid of old CDs, la la may be just what you're looking for. In addition to being good for trading CDs, la la has a social networking component and will recommend new music to you and introduce you to others with similar musical tastes.[Thanks, David!]
After spending the better part of an hour on 
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brad said 4:04PM on 9-20-2006
I'm a happy lala user at the moment, but it'd be nice if more of the stuff I was interested in was available. Sometimes it's worth a few bucks more to not have to wait.
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Phil said 11:16AM on 9-21-2006
I'm also a very happy lala user. Love it. They are slowly rolling out a store to users (lucky enough to be one that can see it) that sells new CDs at pretty reasonable prices. It even shows you CDs that are in your want list in case you can't wait for a trade to happen, I had to pull the trigger on a Nouvelle Vague CD from the store because like has been mentioned...you're gonna wait for newer and more niche stuff.
Plus they have cool t-shirts.
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Record Store Geek said 12:21PM on 9-21-2006
I've been using La La since March and I love it.
La La may not be for everyone, but the trading feature is a great deal if you have CD's you don't listen to anymore gathering dust.
The store offers reasonable prices and if I understand their business model - we are buying from indie record stores instead of massive distributors.
Thanks for spreading the word about La La. I need more folks to sign up and request my crappy CD's.
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tre said 12:24PM on 9-21-2006
I been a LaLa user since July and it's been great.
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Chris said 8:14PM on 9-21-2006
la la is pretty cool but with two caveats.
1. It's $1.75 per CD since you obviously always have to pay shipping on each CD.
2. All CDs are treated equally. Most people seem to prefer this (or at least they did when I brought it up a few times during beta testing in March). However I think it seriously weakens the value of the service. I made a reasonably sized wishlist with some very common 90's CDs as well as recent CDs, less common 80's and 90's CDs. I quickly found that the only CDs I was getting were really, really cheap CDs (popular 90's CDs that tons of people had but didn't want anymore). Despite the fact that most of the CDs I was sending out were going for ~$6-12 on half.com all of the ones I was receiving I could have got for ~$2-5. Once I noticed this I stopped trading my better CDs on la la and took off all of the cheap CDs from my wishlist. It was the only way I could get fair trades. I've since put my more expensive CDs up for trade on switchdiscs.com because they allow you to "price" your CDs (they recommend you follow amazon's used prices). I think this is a much fairer and more efficient way to barter, although it is admittedly not as straightfoward.
As it is set up now I think too many people use it to get expensive discs off of unsuspecting users. It is also impossible to unload "common" CDs that are less desirable now, because these aren't valued any less by la la than brand new CDs.
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