Slashdot Mirror

There's an interesting thread here about it, scroll down to the one that starts "OK, here's the scoop on allofmp3.com" by ronross.

$.01/MB is about what I think is fair for online music, you like $.99/track great, I don't, I like $.05/track. If I thought artists deserve to live like rock stars I'd send them parts of every paycheck, or buy them coke, but I don't. If a musician makes more a year than I do for what is obviously less work then they can't complain.

The URL again where you can legally get tons of good quality music for $.01/MB is www.allofmp3.com
The English button is at the top left, FYI.

Oh, and by the way, I welcome all flames/spam/etc to my personal email address kgb@submarinefund.com

I don't know why it's never discussed when this topic comes up, but there are a couple of on-line music sites that sell for approximately 6-8 cents per song, high bit rates, no DRM. What's really amazing is that it's legal, at least until the RIAA finds a way to buy some Russian legislators.

allofmp3.com has a large selection of music, lets you pick your own encoding (mp3, ogg, wmv, etc.) and your own bitrate (up to 320kbps) and then sells you the files at $0.01 per MB.

As I understand it, the whole thing works like this, legally: Under current Russian law there is no difference between a radio station playing music over the air and a web site downloading music over the Internet. All broadcasters have to pay some small royalties for the right to play the music, and allofmp3.com and mp3search.com pay their royalties and have the legal right to sell you music over the Internet.

So grab your favorite songs at 10 cents each for 320 kbps encodings. And then send a couple of bucks directly to the artist. They'll make more than they would from your purchase of a CD, you'll get the tunes the way you want, no DRM, for less money, and the RIAA will get next to nothing.

Maybe it would make more sense to charge per minute of song, or by bandwidth.

http://www.allofmp3.com/ charges by bandwidth, and offers some losslessly encoded CD's, as well as encoding to a large veriety of lossy formats. I've bought 5 albums from them so far, and I've been very impressed :)

http://www.magnatune.com/ also offers losslessly encoded files, and charges on a sliding scale letting you pay between about $5 and $15 per album iirc.

This is what I was waiting for. iTunes and co can go jump in a lake with their silly lossily-encoded DRM-encumbered overpriced music.

MP3Search and AllOfMP3 offer music at 1 cent per Meg. They are both russian, but if you're worried about your credit card, you can pay them w/ Paypal.

AllOfMP3 also has online encoding. When you buy your songs, you select the format and the bitrate, they encoded it for you, and when it's done it goes in your download queue. Flac, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, AAC and several other formats are available.

In any case, I pay anywhere from 70 cents to $1.86 for an entire album. Which is about what most music is worth to me. There are very few really great artists out there, and I already have most of their CD's. One thing great about these two sites, is you can get very hard to find music and music that is not available in the US. True, some of it may be considered crap in the country it came from, but it's a refreshing change from the shit we get forcefed on clearchannel stations.

I heard of this Russian-based mp3 online store called allofmp3.com (You can go to the English version by selecting the link in the upper left-hand corner). It seems pretty cool and it's licensed under ROMS, which is Russia's equivilent of the RIAA. It looks really cheap since you pay by the megabyte. It's $5 for 500 megs of CD-quality music. I don't know how legit it is, but the reviews I've seen have been pretty positive. It almost seems to good to be true, but if the recording industry here doesn't give people what they want, then why not go elsewhere and get the goods? Afterall, what's wrong with shopping for the best price? I feel like the RIAA is like the designer department store that charges too much for products you can find elswhere for a lot cheaper. They can't get upset when people refuse to shop at their stores if there are other legit stores selling the same products for much less. Now the question is, is allofmp3.com a legit outfit? Does anyone use it and want to comment?

AllOfMP3.com

The only reason Apple ( or any of the other vendors except eMusic [ who have nothing ] ) could wheedle distribution rights out of the record companies was due to their promises about reproduction control.

Or because royalties generally run cheaper in the Russian Federation.

AllOfMp3 provides .mp3 .ogg and more!

Czech it out!

(And I can say, "In Soviet Russia, music pays for you!")

Here you go.......

IMHO, the best online store out there is www.allofmp3.com. This company is Russian based, and because of their somewhat lax copyright laws and much more lenient recording industry, they offer non-encumbered downloads at cheap prices. Basically, the site is pay-for-bandwidth. If you download a song at 128kbps MP3, you essentially pay a penny per minute of audio.

The other awesome thing about that site is the ability to selecte your download format from WMA, MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc, plus the particular quality settings. For most downloads the audio is converted on the fly from a high quality archive (~400kbps), and for others it is actually converted directly from the CD-DA source. In "Advanced Mode", it's almost equivalent to selecting your command-line switches for the transcoder of your choice!

I'm in no way affiliated with these guys, but I love their service. It's actually faster and more reliable for me to download music from these guys than it is to try and venture out onto the P2P networks. Heck, for quality 7 OGG music, I'm paying roughly $0.02 CAD/minute. Plus, they let you pay with PayPal, so it's not like your sending your credit card info to some random Russians.

Not living in the US means I can't use itunes. So...now?

In Soviet Russia, music downloads YOU!

Mods: check the link.

All hail FatWallet:

Here are some legal (in Russia!) MP3 download sites - most flat fee:

allofmp3.com
This site is locally legit and songs can be downloaded for as little as $0.01 per MB. That's around 3 cents per song.

DELit
Unusual emphasis on hard rock and metal acts (east European and Russian youth apparently worship metal acts)

3MP3.ru
$4.55 per month for unlimited downloads.

And you are not stuck with the typical iTMS low-quality 128Kbit file. Most of the Russian sites let you choose your quality and give you the option to do "online encoding" where you can select the settings you want. When the pop up screen shows up you can hit switch to advanced mode toward the bottm and you get the following options:

You can choose between the LAME or BLADE codec and 128, 160, 192, 256, and 320 kbps for each (constant bitrate). Or you can choose LAME variable bitrate at 128, 160, 192, or 256.

If you enjoy these services, 3MP3 should be your first stop to see if you can find what you are looking for at the lowest price. Then I'd move to allofmp3, followed by clubmp3.ru, and then DELit.

Cue the "In SOVIET RUSSIA" trolls now...

All hail FatWallet:

Here are some legal (in Russia!) MP3 download sites - most flat fee:

allofmp3.com
This site is locally legit and songs can be downloaded for as little as $0.01 per MB. That's around 3 cents per song.

DELit
Unusual emphasis on hard rock and metal acts (east European and Russian youth apparently worship metal acts)

3MP3.ru
$4.55 per month for unlimited downloads.

And you are not stuck with the typical iTMS low-quality 128Kbit file. Most of the Russian sites let you choose your quality and give you the option to do "online encoding" where you can select the settings you want. When the pop up screen shows up you can hit switch to advanced mode toward the bottm and you get the following options:

You can choose between the LAME or BLADE codec and 128, 160, 192, 256, and 320 kbps for each (constant bitrate). Or you can choose LAME variable bitrate at 128, 160, 192, or 256.

If you enjoy these services, 3MP3 should be your first stop to see if you can find what you are looking for at the lowest price. Then I'd move to allofmp3, followed by clubmp3.ru, and then DELit.

AllofMP3
Magnatune

AllofMP3 is a Russion site that sells scads of mainstream popular music for $0.01/MB. Magnatune is an Indie lable that lets you decide how much to pay and the artist gets a HEFTY chunk of it. Both services let you chose between mp3, ogg, flac (Allof MP3 has even more choices - It impressed the hell out of me.)

Both services also alow you to preview the whole song or album before you buy it.

The best one I've found is AllOfMP3. It was recommended on /. a while back in a thread and I (nervously) decided to check it out. I put $10 into my account via PayPal and ordered a bunch of MP3 encoded tunes. Haven't looked back since. Tracks wind up costing you around $0.10 a piece for high bitrate encodings and there's absolutely no DRM. The draw back (or positive depending on how you look at it) is that they're based in Russia. I'll vouch that they won't steal your money but I can't vouch for the "to the letter" legality of it. Most of the arguments I've heard is that the RIAA tried to shut them down but lost the case in the Russian court system. Those issues aside, the selection is pretty good but it's definitely more Top 40 stuff. The biggest plus is that there are a lot of international artists that we would only have access to through expensive "imports" state-side.

I've recently discovered the Russian website www.allofmp3.com that allows downloads from $0.01 per meg of mustic and it appears on the surface to be legit. You can even pay for content using paypay so you don't need to worry about the Russian mafia hijacking your account number. (Just your regular paypal problems).

A recent interview with the content manager makes it appear that this site is legal, and it looks like RIAA has nothinng to say about the site. A search on the RIAA web site for allofmp3.com returns zero hits, and doing some searching for the RIAA view of all0fmp3.com also gives no results.

Have other slashdotters had experience with this site? What is your opinion of its legality?

Very interesting point. It's also worth noting that you couldn't spend $10 a month at www.allofmp3.com if you tried (it cost 1 cent a meg no matter what format you choose). Because this site looks pretty legit, I would assume that you have plausible deniability at the least.

Weblisten offers about 150,000 MP3s and WMA for download, and pays royalties to the music industry. They claim to be legal around the world. They have about 150,000 songs available. Uses a simple web interface (I had problems using it with Mozilla, works with Opera, though), and various payment options.

Another one I have used is Allofmp3. They pay license fees in accordance with Russian legislation, so artists do get compensated, but I am not sure about the legality of downloading from them in Germany, or the USA for that matter. They have low prices, a nice site, and a large collection. Songs are available in various format, including Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WMA, at various bitrates, through their Online Encoding program.

HTH

I'm very happy with the sound quality of allofmp3, for the most part. It's definitely better than iTunes or any competitor. However, they most definitely misrepresent the quality.

All of their CDs are stored in their database as a 384 kb/s LAME encoded mp3, not in a lossless form. So, you're pretty much wasting your time if you use extremely high quality ogg or mpc encoding since the quality can never be higher than the original mp3, and whatever you use will have been reencoded at least once, with whatever associated quality losses that entails.

Allofmp3 is trying to resolve this quality issue, fortunately. Right now, they have about fifty of their most downloaded CDs (White Stripe's Elephant, Outkast's epic album, REM's greatest hits, etc.) available online to be encoded losslessly. You have to check the box that says "use original cd data" and you also have the option of getting SHN, FLAC, or APE encoded music. It's not worth it for me though; it gets expensive downloading such large files. What is beneficial is that these albums are capable of being encoded into any of Allofmp3's formats (ogg, mpc, aac) from the original source. See this interview with someone working for allofmp3.

The interview also reiterates some of the legality issues, but of course, it's straight from the mouth of allofmp3 which certainly isn't a non-biased source.

Well, I stumbled upon allofmp3.com, make sure to click "english" up at the top if you're not a native russian speaker! They offer 100MB of MP3's for $1, easily the best price on the web so far and ontop of that you can get them encoded pretty much whatever bitrate you want in whatever format you want!

They seem to be licensed through their russian multimedia and internet society, legality outside of russia is suspect but I doubt that as an end consumer you'd be liable for anything in most western countries.

Simple - allofmp3.com - they're located in Russia, where the royalty laws for downloading music work similarly to those for radio airplay in North America. Because of this, they are able to offer a HUGE selection of music without having to hammer out deals with the major labels.

How much does all this cost? How about $0.01 US/megabyte downloaded? What if I told you that the vast majority of their catalogue was available in high quality formats, that you can encode to your file format of choice (including LAME with --alt-presets, or OGG)? Would that sweeten the deal?

Frankly, I don't know why these guys havn't taken off in North America, aside from a lack of publicity. I suppose there is some fear of giving your credit card to a Russian company, but their processor is highly reputable, and they now also accept PayPal.

Here's some reviews and FAQs about their setup and its legitimacy:

http://www.techimo.com/newsapp/i9599.html

http://www.techimo.com/newsapp/i9599.html

The fine folks over at Allofmp3.com will sell you MP3s for a wide variety of artists. They don't seem to care what country your're in. As far as being legit, they say that they're registered with the Russian copyright authority and that they're authorized to sell what they're offering. I haven't heard about any independant verification of that, though.

This will give you what you want. $0.01 a megabyte. I've used it, it is good.

In Soviet Russia, the music pays you! (Or pretty close, from 1c/track).

http://www.allofmp3.com/onlineview.shtml

And you have the choice to choose your encoding, mp3 cbr, mp3 vbr, mp4 aac upto 320 bitrate, ogg, wma... etc *got a few*

Russia's entry into online music: 1000 tracks, $14.95 per month OR a penny per megabit. Feels slimy but generally agreed to be legit.

Try this or that - apparently legal, no DRM, and much more reasonably priced

Agreed. Though sometimes I use WinMX still (it's nowhere near as polluted as Kazaa), I generally prefer AllOfMP3.com which while slightly sketchy is still less sketchy than P2P services, and the quality is far, far, far better. Also the low price on AllOfMP3 gets me buying lots of music I would otherwise probably never hear and certainly wouldn't buy. Occasionally I frequent iTunes, though a buck a song still feels too expensive to me, and the M4P format, while far better than WMA, is still annoying. Or best of all, Magnatune, which is starting to look like what MP3.com should have been.

All Of mp3 - it's a store that offer music at $0.01/megabyte. They offer mp3,wma,ogg vorbis,mpc and acc formats. Some tracks are mp3 only, but they offer "online encoding" that lets you select format and bitrate (ogg vorbis up to 320kbit/sec!). If you use "online encoding" you pay $0.01/megabyte. There is also flat rate subscription $15/month/1000tracks but it doesn't cover "online encoding". They are a Russian shop but the site has English interface as well. I believe they were able to negotiate such low prices because of poor sales of RIAA music in Russia. RIAA just don't care about Russia (yet?)

http://www.allofmp3.com/ - Run out of Russia, great service (online encoding for example) and great prices ($0.01/mb) but a question about legality when used from the US.

They're fully licenced with the local RIAA equivalent, but there doesn't seem to be any info available on American legislation.

A more in-depth discussion on the site can be found at http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3info.htm

There's another one that's about as cheap, Allofmp3.com. What's more, Allofmp3 does a slightly better job of properly tagging their files, which is important to some of us extremely anal music listeners.

Unfortunately, it's somewhat questionable whether it is legal for non-residents (of Spain for Weblisten, Russia for Allofmp3) to utilize these services. Of course, there's got to be an easier case to be made for their legality than for P2P.

I think iTunes comes closest to the ideal - and you can unprotect the music files, either via rip-and-burn or (blatant plug) read my guide using QTFairUse to get sweet sounding, unprotected AAC files from those nasty DRMed iTunes files, and it's not really that hard to convert them to MP3s, and the quality is good enough for me.

Apple fixes, but RIAA says game over.

The heart of the problem is that the RIAA can do this at all. The major labels are using copyright and their huge portfolio to stunt technological development and skew the software and hardware market. A reasonable compulsory licensing scheme would solve that. Why can't we do it when the russians can

Apple does EXACTLY WHAT EVERYONE SAID THEY WANTED and they still get fucked over.

No they don't. What I want is this. Download legally in your favourite format, free previews and every major artist represented due to compulsory licensing. I don't think they pay the artists very well (how could they at 1c/MB?) and their HTML is non-standard, but it's the best starting point I've seen till now.

what could that feature be?
- Lossless files
- No DRM/Regular MP3
- Extremely cheap pricing ($.10 - $.50)
- EVERY major artist/song represented (and more indie tracks too)

Have you seen this?

I don't know if it is legit or not - I'm a little hesitant to give my credit card number to a Russian site that seems too good to be true. I am tempted because they offer:

• Any file format you want, including ogg, mpc, etc.
• No DRM - you can even have them use LAME to encode the mp3s.
• Price that depends on file size, not number of songs. It is $0.01/MB, which seems absurdly low to me. Or you can just pay $14.95/mo to get up to 1000 songs of any size.
• Not EVERY artist is available, but they have the usual hundreds-of-thousands number that the other sites have.

Now, supposedly they can do this because Russian law treats them like a radio station, so they pay the same royalties that a radio station does. Any thoughts?

What's more, you get to choose the format on most of the titles. You can get ogg, mp3, even mpc at the bitrate of your choosing.

It's a Russian site, so they don't have to abide by our silly US copyright laws, but they still have an English site.

Allofmp3.com beats all those mentioned so far hands down. You get to choose your format (mp3, Ogg, aac, wma) and bitrates (from 128k up to 384k) and you pay based on the number of megs you d/l. Furthermore, there's no DRM on the files you d/l.

• No limits to number of files for download
• Your VIP account active till you have at least one cent on it
• No download speed limitations: speed up to 100 mbps
• Support service
• Cost: only $0.01 per 1 megabyte of data. (that's $1 per 100 megabyte..., where a complete album can cost from about ~$0.6 to ~$1.7, depending on quality of encoding and quantity of tracks...)

• Monthly pay
• Download speed up to 256 kbit/sec (3 streams by 10 Kb/sec)
• You can download up to 1000 files monthly
• Support service
• Cost: only $14.95

I just found out about allofmp3.com last night when I was looking for a rush song and I didn't want to go out and buy the cd(it was late at night). It's a russian site so I'm not sure of the legitimacy of it. $15/month unlimited downloads or $.01/meg metered. It was pretty nice paying $.06 for a song rather than spending $15 on a cd so I could get that one song.

The iPod plays AAC which may not seem like a big deal but it is the successor to MP3 so I suspect you'll be seeing more and more content that way

Ummm says who?

Don't be a stupid fanboy. The successor to the MP3 format seems to be the MP3 format, as size is becoming a non-issue. Microsoft also has the very nice WMA format if you want DRM. The installed base of players still skews strongly toward WMA, and right now more players are being shipped supporting WMA then AAC. That doesn't mean the AAC format is doomed just that it wil probably never become quite as important as WMA. It doesn't really matter though look at a place like AllOfMp3 they allow you to choose what format you want your music in, and the bitrate you want it at. So AAC will probably be around for a long time, but is almost certainly not the succesor to MP3

With SSL transactions (i.e. secure privacy) now as cheap as any other and many nations desperate for money, how do you stop this type of traffic? Can the (international) suppliers of credit be pressured into erecting practical and enforceable monetary "firewalls" around the U.S?

And that site in a nice clickable format.. allofmp3.. They limit bandwidth to about 50KBytes/sec per connection for 'vip' MP3s (the ones you pay $0.01/mb for) which is just about all of them. That's usually plenty fast for MP3s though.