Killing me by degrees

I've been meaning to comment about this article about lala.com from last week's East Bay Express.

Now, there's a new player in the game, one that might likely change the way music is heard and possessed.

Lala is an online swap service where people trade CDs they don't want for ones that they do. Evidently this is such a revolutionary idea that it will make us stop listening to CDs with our ears and storing them on shelves. Used record stores have been around for a long time, and lala is just like trading in your unwanted CDs to Amoeba. The main difference is that at a used store, you can get cash or store credit for your purchase, and at lala you get "credit for a free trade". Good karma. You send a CD to someone, they pay $1.75 to a third party, and you get "good karma", which near as I can tell, is the chance to pay pay $1.75 to that same third party for a CD that you want. So one unwanted CD + $1.75 = another user's unwanted CD.

Another difference, and one of lala's PR selling points is that 20% of each CD trade goes to "the artist". That's after the shipping costs. This works through lala's non-profit Z Foundation which establishes a trust fund that provides health care to "working musicians" (defined as "any individual who has performed live or on a recorded release in the last year and whose music-related income accounts for more than half of their total income"). Their monthly contributions (somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000) could provide health care to somewhere between 50 and 250 working musicians. Better than the cup of nothing that artists get when someone buys a used copy of their disc at Amoeba.

Lala discourages "rip and ship", or ripping a disc to your computer then shipping it to another user. This is "both illegal and against Lala policy". Bad karma. Their terms of service states that "if you ship the CD, you must delete the files". The buyers at Amoeba don't care what you did with your CD before you sold it to them. Because a used music retailer has no control over what users do with their music. And retaining a digital copy of a music CD before trading it away probably strains the boundaries of "fair use" and "first sale", but it's not really illegal. You can't go to prison for ripping and shipping. And the artists get the same %20 cut from ripper-shipper trades than they do from honest trades, so it doesn't "hurt artists" either. It's condescending to users, just like Apple putting "don't steal music" on every iPod.

And I'm still scratching my head over the final paragraph in the article.

In this latest David vs. Goliath battle for the heart of the cultural-technological nexus, vote your conscience and your wallet and back the small mobile intelligent unit over the lumbering monolithic Man. The bastards can't win all the time.

Of all the lala.com hype I keep hearing, the "stick it to the man" rhetoric is the most confusing. Lala's business model ("trade in your unwanted CDs for ones you want") isn't the Bastille. It won't alter the way we listen to music. It's just another way to dump your old Weezer CDs!