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There was some case in the UK, where the copyright of PD-Music was reassigned to those that reprinted the sheets. :(

http://blogs.magnatune.com/buckman/2005/05/hyperio n_record.html

Artists will largely accept this turn of events, because in their view, they've already spent more than enough years starving.

Actually more and more artists, muscians in this case, are turning to the Creative Commons and are uploading their music to services like this one as well as Internet Archives, GoingWare, and Magnatunes amoung others.

Actually, if these labels managed to actually make it infeasible to copy their music, people would lose interest in it. It is increasingly the case that the way people know that a song is available and interesting to buy is unauthorized copying or performance. If they actually got DRM to prevent causal copying, it would be just like they hadn't released the album. People need to be able to tell each other, "I'm listening to this great album, and you should, too" in order for music to be popular. If a mechanism prevents them from actually sharing their favorite music, their friends will have different music, which can actually be shared.

Just one comment, whether you are an Artiste, DJ or Consumer:

http://www.magnatune.com/

They are not evil!

ws

Not even all download purchases. I suspect that only downloads purchased from sources in the UK count, and even then not all of them. So I doubt that the albums I have downloaded from Magnatune http://www.magnatune.com/ are counted towards the UK album chart even though I am in the UK. The internet is global, so ideally to generate a UK 'top N' they should count the tracks downloaded by people in the UK not just sales from UK download sources.

My favorite site for music is http://magnatune.com/ because they support ogg, mp3, and flac... but best of all, at least for the artist, they pay 50 percent of the price directly to the artist. The customer chooses the price within a range for the album. I don't think they sell per song. But you can download each song in its entirety at the lowest quality for free. I have purchased four or five albums from them. They do a great job of being selective as to the quality of music (according to the site owner's subjective judgement anyways) allowed on the site. I just think they are an excellent example of combining low-cost to both the customer and the artist and fairly paying the artists for their creative products. ...Cheers, Charles Witt

"Not that I support the way labels do business, but of course those expenses are taken from the artist's cut. Do you propose that the record labels promote/produce/etc. for free? Any fee they do charge comes out of the "artist's cut". And if the label spends all that money promoting/producing/etc. and it makes no money, those costs are NOT taken from the artist's cut (because they have no cut, the revenue being 0). It's not like the artist is then expected to get a day job and pay back the initial costs (well, maybe some seedy labels work this way, but they are more on the level of "agents" who convince you to buy expensive headshots)."

Well put. The record industry is hugely speculative, and the record company takes all of the risk. There's a lot of appeal to foregoing a record contract and getting a bank loan to finance your own production (so that at least you'll own the masters) but if your project isn't profitable, you still owe the bank the money. If the record company loses money on you, they just drop you.

Magnatune pays much higher royalties than traditional record companies and doesn't deduct anything from royalties for expenses -- but that's because Magnatune makes no investment in the artist. The artist must provide their own masters.

If some enterprising Slashdotter can come up with a way to start a record company that (a) completely funds the production of the CD and (b ) pays royalties regardless of whether the record makes money, then great -- they'll crack the industry wide open and put both Magnatune and the traditional labels out of business.

I have found a formalized music license:
http://www.magnatune.com/artists/license/license_t emplate.html
You might find Sections 6.4 and 9.8 interesting.
This is a license from Magnatune, which is not on the RIAA radar. One can only imagine what the license on an RIAA CD would look like if the record labels actually bothered to make it clear by writing it down.
Disclaimers:
I am not a lawyer. If you are a lawyer, I apologize. If someone else reading this is a lawyer, please correct me.
I am not an RIAA astroturfer. My interest in how record labels think came about naturally.
I do not approve of everything the RIAA does. The RIAA would not approve of everything I do to their work.

Just think one day the artists and the fans might connect directly on the internet with no middle man in between to screw the artists and sue the fans.

There are a few artists that do that, but really, what we need is a middleman (or two) that doesn't screw the artists and sue the fans. Take a good, hard look at MagnaTune -- even if you pay the lowest possible price ($5/album), 50% of it goes straight to the artist (and $2.50 is more than the RIAA will pay them), and you are legally allowed to share it with 5 people. You get to listen to the whole thing in mp3 before you buy, and you can download the whole thing in FLAC once you do pay for it. (FLAC is lossless, so you can burn it straight to CD as if you'd bought it at the music store, only it probably cost you less, and you know the artist got more.)

Start supporting these guys now. They might not have the bands you like now, but you'll find music to like, and you won't be supporting the RIAA. Get even your non-techie friends doing this, and soon enough, we could actually make the RIAA irrelevant.

Just think one day the artists and the fans might connect directly on the internet with no middle man in between to screw the artists and sue the fans.

There are a few artists that do that, but really, what we need is a middleman (or two) that doesn't screw the artists and sue the fans. Take a good, hard look at MagnaTune -- even if you pay the lowest possible price ($5/album), 50% of it goes straight to the artist (and $2.50 is more than the RIAA will pay them), and you are legally allowed to share it with 5 people. You get to listen to the whole thing in mp3 before you buy, and you can download the whole thing in FLAC once you do pay for it. (FLAC is lossless, so you can burn it straight to CD as if you'd bought it at the music store, only it probably cost you less, and you know the artist got more.)

Start supporting these guys now. They might not have the bands you like now, but you'll find music to like, and you won't be supporting the RIAA. Get even your non-techie friends doing this, and soon enough, we could actually make the RIAA irrelevant.

I hope that music creation will never become unprofitable, because to me it sounds unfair not to financially reward artists for their great work, hopefully inspired by passion rather than greed.

However, obviously it's the artists who decide how to publish their own music. And if they decide to sign evil agreements with greedy institutions then that is their choice and they have to live with the consequences.

These days there are alternative ways of publishing music for artists. Some artists, like unclebob simply put their music on their own web site and hope and pray for donations. Others publish their work on sites that have fairer deals.

Personally I hope that sites like magnatune will become more widely used, so that the industry as a whole becomes more ethical.

http://magnatune.com/ (AFAIK)

How far off the mark is Magnatune for you?

That's how I read it as well... now, with that assumption the OP might want to take a look at Jonathan Coulton's site http://www.jonathancoulton.com/

He offers some of his songs as free mp3 downloads available to anyone, then lets you pay to download the rest (still as mp3s!). While I can't say how his purchase system works (as I haven't yet bought any... although lately throwing $60 his way has been rather tempting...), I can't imagine that he's going to have it set up so he's providing people with static links that can be spread around.

Then there are sites such as magnatune, http://www.magnatune.com/ that the OP may want to look at as well. I seem to remember there being a listing on wikipedia of music download stores of various types, that may help him find more sites along the lines of magnatune.

I stopped downloading music via P2P when I found AllofMP3, and I now pay for it happily. Save me the bullshit about it still being "theft" ad nasuem. The fact is, I am willing to pay for music at a reasonable price in a format I want. I am not willing to pay for music any other way. As such, if I am not able to pay for my music in the format I want, I won't buy it. There is absolutely NO loss of sale either way. I won't buy it if I can't get it the way I want it, period. End of story. This is not a negotiable point. The sooner the RIAA and the rest of the music industry gets this through their heads, the sooner they'll be raking in cash again as people flock to "legitimate" quality online music distribution.

Sorry, I don't have a problem with people getting music via p2p, it's clearly non-commercial and there is a strong ethical argument that permits filesharing, but AllofMP3 is creating nothing original, there are merely profiting off of these works and giving no compensation to the authors (at least those in the west). As far as I'm concerned AllofMP3 deserves everything is has comming to it.

If you really want to buy DRM free music and support our culture via the creative commons than there are options http://magnatune.com/.

Don't forget theres actually a lot of music from non-riaa record labels

Theres "big" labels like Magnatune, plenty of small ones, and some cases of artists selling music themselves, like, ... er... MySpace.

nobody offers legal MP3 downloads of music.

"When CD's were release they promised that they would cost around $5 in a few years as the costs of R&D were covered and mass production set in."

I was around when CDs were first launched, and I never heard anything of the sort. In fact, the only place I've heard this is on Slashdot. Like all tall tales, it changes with the retelling. Yours is the first variant I've heard which adds the "$5" angle.

Question for you: Magnatune, who claim that they are "not evil" and do a lot of things right (no DRM, et al) charge about the same as a CD you'd get from a major label, and Magnatune doesn't have the two-tier distribution, or the overhead of traditional record companies (e.g. Magnatune relies on you to produce your own masters; they won't cover the cost of production). Why do you think they charge so much, then? Are they greedy? Do you think it would be more appropriate for them to charge $5 or $2 or even $1, rather than charging what the market will bear?

"As for DRM protected content for $1 a song, the protection limits my ability to move to a new ipod every year without loosing music."

As others have pointed out, moving your music from iPod to iPod is trivial. I'm on my third iPod or so and I've not have a problem in moving my iTMS content. Have you really run into this problem, or is this in the realm of the "record companies promised CDs would cost $5" statement -- it sounds good, and backs up your argument, but isn't necessarily correct?

Workarounds can be found here and here.

"Electronic distribution should mean cheap distribution, and more variety, after all, how much would it cost to put ever lables back catalog on line? Instead, we have the labels doing what they have always done, take more from the artist, take more from the vendor, and keep more for themself. And yes, I know, the best we can do, is to try and starve them out, not buy stuff that comes from a major label, and I am not talking pirating."

Magnatune, whose motto is "We Are Not Evil," has overhead that is much, much lower than that of a typical indie label (ie. they don't give a penny to bands to cover the costs of recording). Yet they still ask you to pay $8 per album, or about a buck a song. Why do you suppose that is? Do you believe they are being greedy?

It seems that many Slashdotters believe something that the big evil labels and even the small non-evil labels do not: music should be free, or $0.20 a song at most. Just to amplify Stubear's suggestion, this is a great opportunity for you. Start your own label, and sell tracks for $0.20. Or, start small... find a band to manage (and there are tons of bands out there that can use a good manager) and help them sell their tracks for $0.20 each (or better yet, $0.10 or even free). You know all those Slashdotters who say (in so many words) "I'll stop pirating when music is a reasonable price, like $0.10?" You would so totally OWN that market. Do it! Seriously, dude.

"To bad it is not working because most people, even artists, don't recognize that the internet gives them the option of droping the labels out of the loop. So instead they continue to empower what should be an antiquiated system."

I think you've nailed it. Many Slashdotters say "the recording industry business model is obsolete" but what they really mean is that it should be obsolete. It must be frustrating to see record companies continuing to do reasonably well, for artists to continue to seek out contracts, and for consumers to still pay for that music. I guess the problem is that record companies produce what customers want, at a price that they are willing to pay.

If the traditional model were antiquated, then we'd see companies like Magnatunes doing well, and enterprises like the iTunes Music Store foundering.

If you would like to buy music from an online store, but you don't want DRM and you want top quality, check out magnatune.com. They let you download CD-quality (either as uncompressed wave files, or as FLAC), MP3, or Ogg Vorbis. And you can listen to everything before you buy. (128 kbps MP3, lower quality than you get when you pay.)

Not only do they not have DRM, but they encourage you to give away up to three copies of the music you buy, as a form of advertising.

They have a sliding scale on prices: you can choose what you want to pay, within a reasonable range. (I just checked, and at least for the album I checked, the range was from $5 to $18.) If you only like one song on an album, pay less for the album. If you really want to encourage an artist to make more albums, pay more. That's cool.

When you buy an album, the artist gets 50% of whatever you pay. Not 50% of the profits, and then they cook the books so they "don't have any profits"... 50% of the gross income. That's outstanding. I love their slogan: "We are not evil."

I have no connection to them, other than being a satisfied customer.

steveha

Creative Commons

Defective by Design's List of DRM-Free Music Sites

dmusic

Electronic Frontier Foundation List of "Artists Online"

emusic.com

Fading Ways Records

FreeCulture.org

harveydanger.com

Janis Ian.com

last.fm

Lime Light Radio

live365.com free downloads

MagnaTune

myspace.com

Nettwerk Download Store

R.evolution I.n P.rogress

RIAARadar.com

uncoolcentral.com

Vision Metal Records

I keep a list on my blog and welcome more suggestions.

If i were to buy music files online it would have to be from a service such as http://magnatune.com/, i'd love to see this idea explored by other record labels but there's just no need for them to consider it if everyone owns an iPod and is happy to swallow their DRM.

c) Even if artists got a pisspoor share of royalties, I'm sure they would much rather prefer it to the fuck all they would get if stuff was P2Ped.

No they wouldn't. Not if they were smart.

Important quote for the lazy:

This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.

(some number crunching)

Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.

If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.

Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero!

How much does the record company make?

(more number crunching)

So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.

When you look at the legal line on a CD, it says copyright 1976 Atlantic Records or copyright 1996 RCA Records. When you look at a book, though, it'll say something like copyright 1999 Susan Faludi, or David Foster Wallace. Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever.

To sum it up, I can't find the exact quote for this bit, but most artists -- even top artists -- would be better off financially if they didn't try to distribute at all, if they played in bars and such, or if they self-publish, via the Internet (magnatune, mindawn) or burn their own CDs. They'd be less popular, but they'd actually make money.

So yes, I think the smart artists, the small-time, bar/nightclub players who distribute their albums on their own CD-Rs, would really, truly, honestly not care whether they get P2P'd. They (like everyone else) make the real money from live concerts, which they get more and better of if they are more popular, which is much more likely if their stuff is getting P2P'd.

Let's see. I use Linux. I would like to play my music on any device I want, including Linux.

There was a time when I actually owned music. Hell, there was a time when we owned software. You are right to have that "right or wrong" disclaimer. It is most certainly wrong.

Watching a movie on a handheld device, like a Video iPod, is a good way to pass the time on, say, a train ride, or a road trip...

Now, in your case, I can actually see it's a tradeoff. But you don't seem to see that, all you see is "If you disagree, you must be a pirate."

There is one kind of DRM I do put up with, and that's Steam. I put up with it because games are software, and commercial games are commercial software, and when was the last time anyone got source code to commercial software? Steam's DRM seems like it would only be a problem to people who are still on dialup, as it requires you to be online at least sometimes, and when it's online, it wants to update. But other than that, it lets me do absolutely everything I want with it -- I can install it on any number of computers, I can backup to DVD or to a network, I can restore to my account or someone else's, I can have it installed as many places as I want (as long as only one is online at a time), I can re-download any game I've bought, no matter where I bought it... Basically, Steam gives me more freedom than the competition, and the only cost is something I will never hit.

Compare that to Windows Media DRM. I like to play my music on Linux, with a commandline program so I can easily play it on a headless box plugged into a sterio, on my Mac laptop (which I'm switching to Linux soon). I like to copy it as many times as I want, copy it over the network, keep it archived in Flac so I can convert from the source to any format I want. I like to actually own my music, and I like to buy from sites like MagnaTune, so I actually support the artist.

I admit that, in terms of sheer cost and convenience (if I give up Linux), I'm tempted by these music rental services. But I don't want to rent my music, I want to own it.

This thread has inspired me to register the domain "publicpriorart.org" -- the intention is to build a database of ideas, thoughts, algorithms,etc in a public place, strictly for the purpose of preventing patents from being filed for them in the future. Anyone interested in helping? Or can point me to an existing effort, so I don't waste my time?

Though there's no one public place, other than the internet, there are a number of websites who share not just programs but other things like music. There are all of the open source website collections like Sourceforge and Freshmear. Here's Creative Commons, for legal music downloads there's Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads and MagnaTunes. More can be found on Wiki's Creative Commons License page.

Andrews said while record companies once offered artists about 30 cents for each song sold, now musicians are earning less than a dime.

If it wasn't for Jobs...we'd all be renting our music by now.

That's total Apple fanboy BS. Most music players contain mostly CD rips, not iTMS purchases. People have always been able to buy music without purchasing tracks online, they continue to do so, and as you acknowledge they can still download music without purchasing it at all. It's the omnipresent fear of the latter that ultimately keeps the record companies in check, not Jobs's balls. I've got nothing against Jobs for being a savvy businessman, but DRM just stinks.

And his novels SUCK. ...and how DARE he blaspheme the Church of Jobs.

"Could you go without purchasing or even downloading music for 3 months? 6 months? a year? to prove a point?"

Geez, I hope so.

a traditional record company sells a CD to distributors for $10. The money they make from that sale must cover the rather significant cash investment they've made. Magnatune, however, invests no money into artist development and thus has ultra-low operating costs compared to record companies.

• all accepted artists must be previewed first, that means someone has to listen the songs and then propose artist to be included into Magnatune listings and make the paper work. This is not an automated system at all.
• all the licenses what they offer must be carefully examined (maybe even by a lawyer) and inserted into the system, just think about how long it takes to implement this system and to test it. Not a simple task, so we could assume there's webmasters/programmers involved
• storing all the data in several formats probably totaling up to few terabytes atleast + backups
• bandwidth costs are probably rather huge because of people listening to the music for free either by downloading MP3s or listening the streams (Magnatune even had few stations at Shoutcast.com but due to costs compared to sales this wasn't a good plan).
• traditional promotion

Yet they charge $8 to $18 per CD.

"And the more they push it, the more people will hear about allofmp3.com. Some of them may visit the site, and see how cheap it is to distribute music online. They may start to realise that it's possible to distribute that 99 iTunes track for 10, cover all distribution costs, and still make a profit."

I was at Best Buy the other day, looking at large flat panel monitors. They were nice, but I just couldn't justify buying one for $1,000. Then when I was in the parking lot, a scruffy looking kid called me over to his car. His trunk was open, and he had some monitors that had "fallen off the truck". And they were only $100! This guy has really shown Best Buy that it's possible to sell a $1,000 monitor for $100, cover all distribution costs, and still make a profit.

"They may start wondering if the recording industry really deserves to be getting 90/track for music that was recorded decades ago by people who are now dead, of if they deserve a 900% profit margin."

It is not mathematically possible to have a profit margin of more than 100%. ITYM "900% markup." But is your issue that record companies charge the same price for music by dead people as they do by people who have not yet shed this mortal coil? If so, do you only pirate music by dead people? A related question: Magnatune allows you to download a CD's worth of music for as low as $5. That's still several X the price of music on the Russian sites. Do you think that this makes Magnatune greedy? At least the traditional record companies will front the artists the production money; Magnatune does no such thing. Do you think they deserve to charge so much?

Smart people -- on both sides of the piracy debate -- know that the record industry is hugely competitive and highly speculative, and that the reality is that net profit margins are actually quite low. With the exception of the big media conglomerates that happen to have recording company arms (and you shouldn't be buying music from them anyway), it's exceedlingly rare to find a record company in the Fortune 500, and the reality is that most record companies are like Magnatune -- they have very small staffs and everybody is generally over-worked and under-paid. This is why there's an inherent issue with flying the "the record companies are greedy" flag when making the choice to pirate or use the Russian sites. At the least, there's the karma issue: it's easy for us to declare that somebody is greedy or makes too much money by some arbitrarily standard when considering whether we're going to violate their rights. But no matter how much money we make, somebody with less money than us just might make that same arbitrary decision about us.

Fansubs are the one thing that i belive make the best point.

many people download them and share them .. but that is for the simple fact that it is the ONLY way to watch them.. once they bring them stateside 99% of the fansub sites drop the files and most of the people (atleast the ones i know) go and buy the DVD's because they want to support it and want the nice disks and art and good quality..

And i am glad to see (from what i have seen) that most anime producers realize this and don't go after fansub sharing people because they know that it is to their benifit..

now when it comes to music.. the only online thing i have come to like is http://www.magnatune.com/...

The allofmp3.com business model is one of the best that I have seen for Online music, Lets look at what the consumer gets

Magnatune is even better because the artists get fair payment for each sale.

Except for sites such as Magnatune where they state that the artist gets half of whatever you pay (there is no fixed price) for the dowmload.

I'll not buy music online till I can get it in the best (lossless) format to [begin] with.

Indeed. It's happening, albeit slowly; You can get some artists' music in FLAC format now.

I doubt that a boycott against **AA will accomplish much. On the other hand, a better business model might just wipe them out completely. There ARE companies out there that use a better business model. For instance http://www.magnatune.com/ -- check them out! You can listen any number of times for free before you buy, you can decide how much to pay (within limits), half of the price goes to the artist (unheard of in **AA labels!!!), and the TOS allows you to share your download with up to two of your friends. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Magnatune.com, although I wish they had an affiliate program (they don't), so I get no monetary reward for mentioning them. But I think they are the wave of the future.

That sounds a lot like Magnatune. Okay, so John Buskman isn't an artist himself, but his wife is, and, in any case, the artists get a good deal: they retain copyright and (non-exclusive) licensing rights, and they get half of the purchase price (after credit card processing fees; and the whole charge for getting a manufactured CD goes to the printing and shipping people). Of course, artists mostly have to show up with the recording ready. But advertizing, distribution, and so forth are covered in the half that Magnatune gets, rather than being charged against the artist's share.

Furthermore, there seems to be a lot of communication among the Magnatune artists; a bunch of the folk/world groups consist largely of solo artists in various combinations. So it is, in a sense, a coop; but the hassle of being an online business, attracting attention, figuring out what makes a good deal, and so on still requires a few people interested in some essentially non-musical effort.

Greetings,

http://www.baen.com/ has been doing this for years. Additionally there are two government standards boards who have been doing it even longer than Baen Books. There are music companies doing this as well, most notably http://www.magnatune.com/.

Now, while I buy books from other publishers than Baen, I find that I buy 4x from Baen than I buy from any other publisher. To be honest, it was their free books that got me hooked. I was bored one night and looking for the next book to read, I tumbled across Baen's free library and picked an author at random. The author's name is David Weber and I enjoyed the book so much that I went out the following weekend and bought the entire series (8 books at the time). A couple weeks later, I went about the complete series again and sent it to a friend. And then about 6 months ago, I bought the entire series again (Up to 11 books now) and donated them a local library. All total that is roughly $300 that I have spent, and I have since found another 5 authors in their stables that I read almost religeously.

Magnatune is similar, I first heard about them when a friend handed me a CD (This is legal under Magnatune's rules) with about 200 MP3's of music from their stable. I found that I really liked 6 of the artists on there and have since bought every CD that each of those bands has. BTW, I have not bought music from any of the RIAA companies since I found Magnatune.

"The real deal in all this mess is that content creators "REALLY DON'T NEED THE *AA ANYMORE" since for not much more than a data center contract, any record label, including independents, can set up their own music distribution system over the Internet."

Indeed. Magnatune is a great example. They've stated that their top artists can make hundreds of dollars a year. The catch is, of course, that to have your work published by Magnatune, you need to come up with the recording yourself -- unlike a typical recording contract, where the record company funds the recording, but they get the rights to the recording. And Magnatune is great for music fans, too -- you can pay as low as $5 for a CD if you like; you can share it, and it's free from DRM.

So, Magnatune is great for musicians who have the means and ability to create their own recordings, and who are satisfied with making hundreds of dollars a year. And it's great for music fans who want to pay about half of what they would on iTunes, and who don't like DRM -- in other words, pretty much everybody reading this.

Why Magnatunes is not hugely popular with either musicians or the general public is, as the math textbooks like to say, an exercise left to the reader.

i'm interested to see how they would set up a legal music downloading system with absolutely no DRM wrapper

Perhaps like emusic.com, or magnatune.com, or allofmp3.com? Why must there be a DRM wrapper? Everything on iTunes is aready available FOR FREE on P2P networks, yet iTunes is still selling millions and millions of songs.

also, does their language seem...well, a little orwellian?

The language sounds Orwellian, as it should. DRM is not about combating piracy. DRM about control, private property, rights of first sale, free speech, and personal freedom-- all subjects about which Orwell wrote very eloquently.

what bit rates are offered in ogg format?

can you download it in two different formats?

I was vaguely interested until I saw "proprietary format" that won't work in whatever player I feel like using (iTunes, or my Rio Karma, or whatever).

There are companies such as Magnatune that'll sell you 100% legal (as opposed to "of questional legality" like AllOfMP3.com), DRM-free music, without ads, or a monthly subscription, or any other sort of nonsense. There are some really interesting artists there, too, and quite a wide range of music.

I don't work for them or get paid by them, I just think they're awesome because of the way they're doing business and supporting independant artists.

Like Magnatune? ;)

Sorry to bang on about it and okay, I know the selection isn't the best but it's not bad at all. You can try entire albums before you buy, download in whatever format (MP3, OGG, WAV, Flac, etc), albums costs $6.00 each (you can pay more if you want), it doesn't need any proprietary player, the downloads work with any MP3 player.

Oh and you can give 3 copies of your download to friends legally. And the help is way better than anything else out there for music.

And yes, I do use it. In fact, it's the only place I get music these days because I'm tired of being treated like a potential criminal ("pirate") and paying for the privilege.

It's not that hard. In afternoon you can obtain 20-30 CDs' worth of music. Give it a listen. Any of it that floats your boat, let someone know.

Nothing would please the free culture movement more than to see "piracy" and RIAA record sales both plummet to zero. Now.

No DRM, no Internet sales or rentals. It's that simple.

http://www.magnatune.com/

Magnatune does sell non-DRM'd music. And it has a bunch of great stuff too.
I suggest starting at the top of the Best selling albums of all time list and working your way down. Not everything there does it for me, but I have bought at least ten magnatune albums.

Magnatune does sell non-DRM'd music. And it has a bunch of great stuff too.
I suggest starting at the top of the Best selling albums of all time list and working your way down. Not everything there does it for me, but I have bought at least ten magnatune albums.

If you only want to pay for what you're downloading, try Magnatune.

They have quite an interesting collection of independant artists, and you can listen to whole albums before buying.

Not affiliated in any way, just impressed with some of the music I've found there (I really like Solace and Shiva in Exile, for example).

If you only want to pay for what you're downloading, try Magnatune.

They have quite an interesting collection of independant artists, and you can listen to whole albums before buying.

Not affiliated in any way, just impressed with some of the music I've found there (I really like Solace and Shiva in Exile, for example).

If you only want to pay for what you're downloading, try Magnatune.

They have quite an interesting collection of independant artists, and you can listen to whole albums before buying.

Not affiliated in any way, just impressed with some of the music I've found there (I really like Solace and Shiva in Exile, for example).