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Only way more expensive...

And encumbered with DRM...

No thanks!

OK, I'll confess it right here. I buy music over at All Of MP3. Now, I have felt guilty about this. In fact, once I get a job again, my plan was to buy all of the music I downloaded, either as CDs or as iTunes/Napster/whatever. However, I changed my mind when I found out about the Sony rootkit.

The fact of the matter is that most people who use file sharing networks feel that what they are doing is stealing. Most people would rather buy a legitimate copy of their music. This is why iTunes is making the record companies a lot of money; Apple certainly isn't making money off of it. The software and video game industry has had piracy since day one, and both industries remain very profitable.

I hope that the backlash caused by Sony's antics results in the record labels no longer treating their customers like criminals. When the record companies break their trust with their customers that way, people are more inclined to get their music from All of mp3 instead of iTunes or the record store.

While we're talking about music, I would like to dispel one myth: The myth that concerts is where musicians make their money. Thomas Dolby points out that "Touring loses money for most acts, until you get to the 200 stadiums a year (or five nights at the Garden) stage".

Well, there's hope even for Windows users :)

Of course it's great that Linux can easily read the music tracks, but you still gave Sony money in the first place. Personally I would have thrown a couple of bucks in this direction:

http://music.allofmp3.com/r2/G3/Live_In_Tokyo_(Sat riani__Vai__Petrucci)/group_3696/album_2/mcatalog. shtml?albref=14

No EULA, No software installed on my computer - and more important - absolutely zero money to Sony - only to the artists.

The record companies will wake up eventually or they die - it's as simple as that. Meanwhile I am happily buying more music than I have bought in many years.

What kind of ignorant assmaster buys CDs any more? Don't you know you can get your music legally for pennies on the dollar from Allofmp3.com? Allofmp3.com sold me more than 1000 MB of music for just $20, and it's all legit. Why, I can find more music on Allofmp3.com than I can on iTunes, eMusic, and KaZaA combined -- and it's all legit. Just go to Allofmp3.com in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or even Safari! Remember, Allofmp3.com is completely legitimate and legal and contains no DRM.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Proud user, Allofmp3.com

What kind of ignorant assmaster buys CDs any more? Don't you know you can get your music legally for pennies on the dollar from Allofmp3.com? Allofmp3.com sold me more than 1000 MB of music for just $20, and it's all legit. Why, I can find more music on Allofmp3.com than I can on iTunes, eMusic, and KaZaA combined -- and it's all legit. Just go to Allofmp3.com in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or even Safari! Remember, Allofmp3.com is completely legitimate and legal and contains no DRM.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Proud user, Allofmp3.com

What kind of ignorant assmaster buys CDs any more? Don't you know you can get your music legally for pennies on the dollar from Allofmp3.com? Allofmp3.com sold me more than 1000 MB of music for just $20, and it's all legit. Why, I can find more music on Allofmp3.com than I can on iTunes, eMusic, and KaZaA combined -- and it's all legit. Just go to Allofmp3.com in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or even Safari! Remember, Allofmp3.com is completely legitimate and legal and contains no DRM.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Proud user, Allofmp3.com

What kind of ignorant assmaster buys CDs any more? Don't you know you can get your music legally for pennies on the dollar from Allofmp3.com? Allofmp3.com sold me more than 1000 MB of music for just $20, and it's all legit. Why, I can find more music on Allofmp3.com than I can on iTunes, eMusic, and KaZaA combined -- and it's all legit. Just go to Allofmp3.com in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or even Safari! Remember, Allofmp3.com is completely legitimate and legal and contains no DRM.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Proud user, Allofmp3.com

What kind of ignorant assmaster buys CDs any more? Don't you know you can get your music legally for pennies on the dollar from Allofmp3.com? Allofmp3.com sold me more than 1000 MB of music for just $20, and it's all legit. Why, I can find more music on Allofmp3.com than I can on iTunes, eMusic, and KaZaA combined -- and it's all legit. Just go to Allofmp3.com in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or even Safari! Remember, Allofmp3.com is completely legitimate and legal and contains no DRM.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Proud user, Allofmp3.com

What kind of ignorant assmaster buys CDs any more? Don't you know you can get your music legally for pennies on the dollar from Allofmp3.com? Allofmp3.com sold me more than 1000 MB of music for just $20, and it's all legit. Why, I can find more music on Allofmp3.com than I can on iTunes, eMusic, and KaZaA combined -- and it's all legit. Just go to Allofmp3.com in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or even Safari! Remember, Allofmp3.com is completely legitimate and legal and contains no DRM.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Proud user, Allofmp3.com

Of course, if you want to ensure compatibility in the future, you need to purchase songs that don't rely on proprietary restrictions management or encoding formats. the question of "which DRM" is a silly one to ask -- if you're purchasing cryptographically restricted music, then you should not have any expectation of being able to use it freely, either today or in the future.

http://www.allofmp3.com/ lets you buy DRM-free music and instead of paying per song, you pay per bandwidth... you choose your format that you want and you choose the compression rate. It's pretty sweet. It's based out of Russia and is legal to buy from.

allofmp3.

Indeed, or allofmp3.com is a legal download service based in Russia. It allows you to download from a massive library in many different formats, and is extremely cheap (two cents a meg!).

There are plenty of DRM-less legal download services available, if you look around. And with prices like that, you'd have to be mad to stay with iTunes.

I've been using allofmp3.com for my music. It's a foreign website, they've signed agreements with the Russian RIAA-equivalent, and as far as I know, it's entirely legal to buy music there.

It's fast, I find the songs I want, the formats are unencumbered with DRM, and I pay a good price. ($0.15 per song is typical)

What's not to like?

Well, you really have no choice in the matter unless you go to an independant music provider like Vitaminic who will provide the music in good old fashioned mp3 format... but don't expect to see Eminem's entire music collection on there. Actually, don't expect many current major musicians at all. You could try allofmp3.com. The music is provided in the format of your choosing but the legality of their pay service in North America is questionable at best. I personally found iTunes to be a system hog and Napster isn't a whole lot better - but at least it works with Windows Media Player. Of course, that's useless to me because I can't stand the setup of Napster, iTunes, WMP, or even Winamp when it comes to handling my music library. I leave that to Foobar... but that means getting locked off my content. If you ask Apple or Napster how to use it on xx player, they'll just tell you to burn then rip to mp3. It works well enough, but expect a bit of quality loss from the transcoding.

Vote with your cash, buy non-DRM encumbered CDs or else just steal it. I'd prefer to take the moral issues and risk of stealing rather than just be Sony's bitch and install their shitty rootkit on my computer.

Or better yet, buy your music from cheaper and DRM-free places.

No DRM. Whatever format you want. http://www.allofmp3.com/

I hear that http://www.allofmp3.com/ is licensed to sell music via the internet - so no DRM CD's
That would give you a digital license if I understand it correctly so it would be good for the iPod

Someone that understands cross border laws in the different countries would be better qualified to comment I am sure

You could have gotten most for $0.10 in any format without any drm

You could have gotten most for $0.10 in any format without any drm

You could have gotten most for $0.10 in any format without any drm

You could have gotten most for $0.10 in any format without any drm

You could have gotten most for $0.10 in any format without any drm

You could have gotten most for $0.10 in any format without any drm

You could have gotten most for $0.10 in any format without any drm

No.. the correct URL for getting music is: http://www.allofmp3.com/. :)

What's different/interesting about that? Everyone else has been illegally downloading for years too. The point is that when iTunes comes out we have a legal option, just like you will.

Already signed up here in frustration http://www.allofmp3.com/

Only 2 weeks ago.

4) Buy from Russian site... Artists probably won't get paid.

I think they'll get paid, just at a much lower rate (an order of magnitude less). At least, I believe this to be true of allofmp3.com. The biggest problems with this option are: quality (improving) and selection (improving very, very slowly).

shop at allofmp3.com.

Simple as that.

I regularly buy my music for around $1.50 - $2.50 per album in my choice of formats and encoding rates. Web based download service is available for all non-windows users, and they have a nice peice of software for the windows world appropriately named "explorer". ;)

http://www.allofmp3.com/

Go Russia.

Yep they are, it is called AllOfMp3

It is legal in Russia, it is legal to import it to USA (if you happen to live there) and it is legal to listen.

The best of all is that its in MP3 format so it works with every mp3 player on the planet. The only glitch I've ever found is that sometimes (but not often) the tags aren't as good as they could be. I usually run my downloads through Easy tag before importing into my IPOD.

I guess All Of MP3 is below their radar, but US$1.50 for an entire album is pretty damn cheap, even compared to Walmart.

I have an iPod and use http://www.allofmp3.com/ ... much cheaper than any of the music stores reviewed in this article. 10 cents a track, no subscription, choice between many codecs.

As a Linux only user, I'm contiually frustrated by my lack of music buying options online.

Just see my other post above, a nice option is allofmp3

You are welcome.

P.s. no... I deffinitley do not work there =oP

For long, the best music store for me has been AllOfMp3

I can buy lossless formated music, ogg or even raw .WAV music, unencumbered by DRM, quite cheap and easly. (Oh and they have a damn lot of music).

And also, there are a number of different ways to pay (in case you do not trust Russian stores):
-Credit Card
-Pay Pal
-Xrost
-Bank Transfer
-WebMoney

Cool uh?

I can only say, it is about time somebody got the pricing correct.
http://www.allofmp3.com/

pfsht..
http://www.mp3search.ru/
http://allofmp3.com/

Give me cheap downloads (~$.30 a song). Allow me to pay by bandwidth or length rather than per track, so I don't feel ripped off when I download a 40 minute album that has 18 songs on it, when Thick as a Brick was $2. Let ME choose the codec and bitrate, so I'm not stuck with crappy AAC files. And above all, don't try to prevent me from copying the files to as many cds, music players, and other computers as I like. I bought the music, and now the transaction is over... you have no right to tell me what to do with it from that point on.

That would be worth the money to me, and in fact I get a lot of music from http://www.allofmp3.com/ which has all those features. It's much easier than hunting for some obscure record on p2p, and not even knowing what quality of encoding you're going to get. I've spent at least $50 there in the past couple months, and I even plan to buy actual CDs of some of the music I got, as I want to have it in lossless format. But if iTunes, with all their stupid pricing and restrictions on what you can do with the files once you get them, was the only way to get music online... I'd go p2p in a heartbeat. I'm not going to pay anybody to give me LESS functional copies of the music than copyright law entitles me to, no matter how good it is.

"consumers should be able to download music to have a listen before they buy; perhaps someone needs to form an association similar to the RIAA, but that embraces the concept of worthwhile content that can be used without restriction. Maybe just a recording studio that does it?"

Did you mean something like magnatune?

They have no isue with people downloading their full albums in *high* quality mp3 format so you can make up your mind wether or not its worth buying. Then to boot you get to choose how much you want to pay ($5 minimum). The artist gets HALF of that!

Then there's always allofmp3.com , but you gotta wonder how legitimate they are...

If I take a picture of the Ford instructions on how to build the new Mustang and build my own Mustang from those instructions to give to my friend who wants one, Ford may have lost some money. Especially if I make 10,000 cars from these instructions and give them to 10,000 friends or random people I don't know. That isn't perfectly legal and neither is stealing music.

I think the prices are too high and very few people would steal if the prices were about $2.00 per CD or less... Kinda like this site is selling them at.

Actually, there's a cool parallel between that Slate article you mentioned and this Red Herring article. My understanding (and I didn't RTFM, just skimmed it) is the RIAA "wants, and will insist upon having, variable pricing", and doesn't believe there should be a uniform price of .99. Edgar Bronfman, Jr. proposed theaters charge higher prices for more expensive movies. Why, he reasoned, should you pay the same amount to see a $2 million movie as you would to see a $200 million one? So he was also one for variable pricing.

Fact is, variable pricing schemata won't work for movies and most fickle music consumers will be damned to pay more than a buck (when they're already playing fair and eschewing p2p apps ala Kazaa, Soul Seek and even AllOf MP3.com.

True that services that allow you to subscribe might be cheaper but you have to play for them for the rest of your life. That's not cheap in the long run. Check today is not what Apple is about, it's cheap in the future. That is why although their computer cost more off the shelf the level of security and amount of free software makes up for it in the end. But on your note, try services like http://www.allofmp3.com/ you can download in any format and at any bit-rate you want and songs usually cost less than $0.05 a piece. Whole albums are sometimes under a dollar at 128kbs mp3.

http://www.allofmp3.com/ - works for iPod - works for DumbJ Ditty

Dell Selling Crap To Idiots for Years to Come

True that services that allow you to subscribe might be cheaper but you have to play for them for the rest of your life. That's not cheap in the long run. Check today is not what Apple is about, it's cheap in the future. That is why although their computer cost more off the shelf the level of security and amount of free software makes up for it in the end. But on your note, try services like http://www.allofmp3.com/ you can download in any format and at any bit-rate you want and songs usually cost less than $0.05 a piece. Whole albums are sometimes under a dollar at 128kbs mp3.

http://www.allofmp3.com/ - works for iPod - works for DumbJ Ditty

Dell Selling Crap To Idiots for Years to Come

You'd be downloading from regular sources, using software that's already given away, and findable with google. At least the Russian mob-run allofmp3.com provides a real service.

Don't know if it's a typo or what, but it's very misleading.

No, I'm no advertiser.

http://allofmp3.com/ does it right. Not only can you select what format you want (MP3, OGG, FLAC, many, many, others), the prices are based soley on the size of the resulting file. On average the price is $0.02 USD per megabyte. I purchased 5 songs last night for only $0.54. However, I could have gotten the same 5 songs in FLAC format for only $2.50.

Why couldn't iTunes do the same?

Will Kazaa be appealing in 2006? It's been a LONG time since I found Kazaa appealing...

PS: AllOfMP3.com gets my vote - and it seems to be perfectly legal...

In Soviet Russia, music buys you.

In AllOfMp3.com you can preview all of the songs with low quality. Of course, some people do not like buying there but, anyway you can use it if you are not sure about a new release.