Lala has done for CD swapping what NetFlix has done for DVD rentals. It’s a great service: post what you have, what you want, someone sends it to you using a pre-paid mailer, pay just $1.75 per CD.

The idea behind LaLa: get rid of your old music for something new. What exactly defines “old music?” It’s relative to your tastes. For me, old music is that which I regret ever having bought. It wasn’t hard parting with Joy Division’s “Still” which I bought and never listened to. I won’t be afraid to give up Nazareth’s Greatest Hits either.

There are feelings LaLa facilitates piracy. How? I can buy/sell/trade a second-hand CD on Amazon.com, eBay, or down the street. It’s a question of retaining MP3 rips or duplicate CDs.

I’ll never trade my favorite artists so it’s a non-issue. But the rest of my collection, probably 300 out of 400 discs, is crap. I own so many crappy discs because iTunes and CD singles didn’t exist at the time. Even worse is the “no return” policy for music. I can return almost anything if I don’t like it, but not so with Samantha Fox’s Greatest Hits.

I’ve probably overpaid the musc industry over the years and LaLa offers me the means to make it right: goodbye crappy discs but I’ll keep your MP3s around just in case I want to hear your hit single between now and eternity.

Alternatively, the recording industry can juice up my iTunes account as credit for the hundreds of craptastic discs in my CD collection. I’ll be happy to delete the MP3 rips if I can buy the hit singles instead.

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