LaLa.com

Are you as tired as I am of the utterly worthless, outdated, grandmother-suing entity known as the RIAA? Basically, their philosophies can be boiled down to this: They hold absolute control over your music. They want you to buy your music on CD. They do not want you to do anything with that CD but listen to it. If you insist on downloading music, you must obtain it in a form that greatly limits what you can do with it.

Playing by those rules guarantees a fat income for the RIAA. Oh, and they just might throw some bucks the artists' way.

Well, today's FamilyFirst site offers you a way to listen to some great music AND get some money directly into the artists' hands. It's also extremely affordable.

And the RIAA gets nothing.

It's called LaLa.com. They offer you CD swapping for a dollar per CD (plus 75 cents postage). Here's where that money goes, in their own words:

For the first time, musicians will receive economic support directly from their fans. Each time a lala.com member trades a CD from a 1.8 million-title catalog with another member, 20% of the trading revenue will be contributed to performing artists. This new model for direct contributions is enabled by lala.com's social accounting technology. Lala.com is redeploying digital technology that once threatened the economic viability of recorded music to help musicians and fans create an efficient system for the marketing, discovery and purchase of music in the digital age.

Look though your CD collection. Are there any you haven't listened to for a while? List them with LaLa and let them find trades for you. You give them your wish list, they handle the rest.

The artists get a cut, too. You're paying a very reasonable fee for music that you can do anything you want with. I would recommend ripping them and saving your music in mp3 or Ogg Vorbis format.

There are lots of online radio stations here to listen to, as well.

Give LaLa a try. It's one more nail in the RIAA's coffin.
http://www.lala.com/

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