lala.com

Facebook User says: Lala is great for listening to your music collection online. Let's say you go over to a friends house and you forget you iPod/music player. All you have to do is log on to Lala from your friends computer and you have full access to your library. Lala is also a great tool for discovering cool new music. Much like Twitter, Lala give you the ability to follow others and have others follow you. So, for example, if you see a friends tat has the same musical interests as you, or even a complete stranger, you can follow them. Following this person will allow to see their recent listening activity in your feed.

When was the last time you listened to all of your CDs? Lala let you trade CDs you haven't listened to in a while for other members CDs. Within a few minutes you can list the CDs you have, and pick the CDs you want. Each time you ship a CD you "have" to a lala member, you're allowed to get a CD you "want" from any other lala member. The site is supported by a community of music lovers, encouraged by lala's payback to the artist: 20% of the price of a trade ($1) goes back to the artists. Well worth checking in!

I joined lala about a month ago, after reading about it on Yahoo News. I was intrigued. I'm always looking for new CDs. (I get bored with what I have pretty quickly.) I just love being able to try out new music for $1.49 per CD. It's great! The ones I really like, I plan to buy my own copy so I can keep them circulating and share the love with others. Lala really is a wonderful service. I feel privileged to get to take part in the beta!

I've been a member of LaLa for over a month now and it is a great site. I've shipped 45 CDs and received 35. The difference comes from the fact that not all of the CDs I want are available from other members yet. When they go live in July, that will probably not be a very common problem. While they are still working out the kinks, things are going great and it's a lot of fun being involved in the process of enhancing the list of features available. Quite a few of the members (myself included) are completely addicted to LaLa. We get so excited about getting mail: did any LaLa envelopes arrive? We logon first thing in the morning to check to see if anyone has requested any of our CDs. Some of us check on and off all day. And it's the last thing we do every night - check for any requests we can ship. Of course we have to get our daily fix of reading all the conversations taking place in the feedback and joining in. I love it.

An interesting concept. Letting users swap CDs with each other. And having 20% of the website's fee being voluntarily donated to the artists. Wow! The first time you hear about this, you might wonder if this can possibly work. Indeed, it is by no means a given that the idea can prevail. Then again, remember when Craigslist started up? How were they ever even going to make back their costs? Yet that site has prospered hugely. Possibly Lala might, too. Amazingly, they garnered $9 million in VC funding. What do those VCs see in Lala? Shades of 1999.