Don’t know what to do with that pan flute CD? Thinking of turning it into a coaster for your iced tea? Don’t do it, because somebody out there might just be looking for it. The great news is there are some new sites to unload those what-was-I-thinking CD choices and getting the CDs you’d wished you’d bought.
Two of the new online sites, BarterBee.com and lala.com, have become the hot, cheap haunts of music junkies everywhere. Both are bartering sites that allow sellers and buyers to swap and send CDs for a buck. Another site, Title Trader, allows the user to trade CDs, books, DVDs and other goodies for free.
Lala.com, devoted to music, works in a similar fashion by hooking up buyers and sellers of pre-owned CDs for only a dollar plus a forty-nine cent shipping cost. With over a million titles, lala.com provides free shipping kits, guarantees on quality and promises no hidden costs, but lala.com goes a step further by giving back to the artists. Bill Nguyen, one of the good guys behind lala.com, boasts what no other used record store or online site does and that’s giving artists 20% of their revenues on pre-owned CDs sales.
Title Trader is a free service that allows users to exchange books (paperback and hardcover), swap music CDs, and barter DVDs and VHS tapes with other community members from anywhere around the world. The only cost to users is postage.
BarterBee.com, working with a point system that means no bidding, no haggling or money changing hands between members, markets CDs, movies and games as a cheaper, easier than the industry monsters as Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes, GameStop, Ebay and Amazon. BarterBee.com claims no hassle returns and insured mailings, as well as the “largest online marketplace focused on buying and selling pre-owned CDs, DVDs and Games.”
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
