Swapping tunes, supporting musicians

Lala.com may be a sign of the music piracy tide turning. Or at least its marketing message is. On its About Us page, the new music site, which fully launches this summer, says it's completely legal and, "while there is no obligation to do so, 'la la' is setting aside 20% of trading revenues for musicians." It just may help make supporting musicians more cool than illegal file-sharing. The San Jose Mercury News calls lala "a mix of social networking, Internet swap meet and music store. It's MySpace.com meets eBay meets iTunes." It also represents another trend and buzzword for Web 2.0: "mash-up." Its founders say they're mashing together community, search, and retail (new and used) so people can "discover music the old fashioned way - through conversation," like in those local independent music stores depicted in the book and movie "High Fidelity." It's a great idea, but I wonder if it isn't a temporary solution (like NetFlix) or for an older user base - people who've had time to amass huge CD collections that are mostly gathering dust?