Not too long ago, a friend emailed me about a new online music retailer named Murfie http://www.murfie.com/ that he had heard about on NPR . I was addicted to Murfie within moments of hitting their site!

For me, Murfie rocks for four reasons:

First, when I buy a CD on Murfie, I actually own it. I own the plastic disc. It’s mine. They hold onto it for me and will ship it to me if I want. I buy and love CDs because I get all the “first-sale doctrine” legal rights I want with my music – rights that I assure you you want, and that you do NOT get with iTunes et. al. Here’s a great ZDnet article on the difference between online music and CD music legalities.

Second, it’s a marketplace. I can ship them the CDs in my collection that I think I might want to trade or sell (or, hell, ALL my discs!). They inventory them and rip them and when someone searches for something I have, it shows up and they can buy it or offer a trade for it. Ditto the discs I buy directly on Murfie (new or used). I used to be an avid user of Swap.com for my CDs – but no more.

Third, I’m a cheapskate. I own > 1,000 CDs and probably half of them were purchased used or were trades. Tonight I purchased five used discs on Murfie for a total of $16.00 ripped to FLAC and delivered to my hard drive. That averages to $3.20 per album. At iTunes pricing of $1.29 per song, that’s like buying 2.5 songs from the album except that you get ALL the songs on the album and the rights to listen to it wherever you like and trade it and sell it! To-date I have purchased a total of 26 discs on Murfie – averaging down to $4.69 each ripped and delivered. But 5 of those 26 were new discs, which seem to be priced between $8 and $12. If you remove those 5 new discs, you get down to an average of $3.29 per each of 21 CDs, ripped and delivered and owned. This is a no-brainer if you ask “cheap me!”

Fourth, rationally or irrationally, I’m an audio quality nut, and I “jst sy NO 2 lssy music.” Murfie lets me pick how I want my CDs ripped. I choose lossless FLAC, but they also offer MP3 (256 kbps ABR) and AAC. You may not care about this, of course, but it’s always nice to know there are options.

Why am I bothering YOU about this? Well, since Murfie is a market, it behaves along the lines of Metcalfe’s Law: the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of users. The more people using Murfie, the more buyers and sellers and CDs in the system! That’s a good thing for me as a user, so I’m happy to pimp them out!

So go check out Murfie, sign up, and get Murfying!!!!

NB: I do not have any financial interest in Murfie – though that may change as they close up their A round. I’m simply a very very very happy, addicted customer. I LOVE YOU MURFIE!!!!!