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Emusic Relaunches - Cheap, DRM-Free Downloads
An anonymous reader writes "Emusic.com has relaunched today. This is important for several reasons. 1) They sell MP3s. No DRM. I can play them on my Linux box or wherever. 2) They are encoding at 192Kbit/s VBR. That's near CD quality (and how I rip my own CDs). They are focusing on lesser known independent music and providing some editorial content to separate the good from the bad. I see lots of great jazz, classical, and folk/country stuff in their library. 4) Subscription rate is 9.99/month for 40 tracks. That is $0.25 a track. Much cheaper than everywhere else. It's near my pricepoint. This is the first online music store that I will seriously consider. (And actually the first that I _can_ consider since I'm a linux user.)"
Here's the link to browse their catalog!
Stupid promo redirect.
...welcome our Cheap, DRM-Free Music Downloading Overlords!
Friends help you move...
REAL Friends help you move dead bodies... ^_^
...if for no other reason than to encourage this kind of service.
:)
I haven't even seen the catalog yet.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Ummm yeah... submitted by an "Anonymous Reader", not by the owner of emusic at all, right? /wonders how much that cost.
are they hoping you might forget to pick up all 40 of your tracks? odd.
allofmp3.com is still superior
-- oh.... so..... sleeeeeepy.
That is $0.25 a track. Much cheaper than everywhere else. It's near my pricepoint. This
First it was anything but $0.99/track is not cheap enough. Then $0.99 is not enough,.. Now people are not even willing to spend a whole quarter for a song? I think there are some people here who will still be complaining when they are free, just because they aren't encoded at a high enough bitrate!
The iTMS was the only online music store that really had me sit up and take notice. Now eMusic is making me do the same thing.
iTunes is nice since it's cheap per song, but the selection, though huge, misses out one some less mainstream, more niche genres. eMusic seems to fill in the missing areas pretty well (although still not enough psychedelic trance) and provides DRM-free tunes. This company could go quite far.
For most consumers, though, I think the price-per-song versus a monthly price could still be the deciding factor.
I had the "Platinum" membership- and to tell you the truth despite my very non-mainstream tastes, they didn't have a whole lot that I liked. Also, I hated how their electronic music was organized (there was little-to-no Drum and Bass/Jungle in the Drum and Bass/Jungle section!) Additionally, a 30 second sample (taken from the first 30 seconds!) of a 10 minute electronic music track (that takes 2 minutes to build up anywhere) is a use-less way to "try before you buy."
Additionally, there are too many Live recordings (read: poor sounding recordings). For example, they have a bunch of The Selecter tracks, but they're all live. Sorry, I want to studio versions.
I hope its useful for you. But I paid my money, downloaded some good tracks, a bunch of bad tracks, and walked away.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I cannot search their collection without first registering (free albeit). Why should I register without knowing what they have first? Sorry, I am not a potential customer.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
How about Epitonic for free music downloads! Free, legal, and something that everyone will like.
CD quality is 1411 kbps. Certainly 192 is higher than the commonly seen 128, but at less than 14% of CD quality I wouldn't call it "near" CD quality. 320 kbps, which is the highest my chosen ripping software will go, is still roughly 1/4 CD quality.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
I encode at 256 or 320 VBR.
No, no, I'm lying. I encode with ogg, set at quality 6. That's not bad, but it still isn't CD quality.
If you have a *good* stereo (no, your computer speakers, or a headphone pluged into your soundcard does not count), you'll hear artifacts if you actually have the real source. In addition, mp3's at moderate quality always sound "flat" to me.
I'll wait until someone offers lossless quality downloads. Until then, I'm far better off buying used CD's...at $3-$5 a CD, it's a far better value.
When Emusic.com had unlimited MP3's for something like $14.99 a month and I was a subscriber for a couple of years. Then they "relaunched" with monthly limits and I jumped ship. I was willing to try new music when there wasn't a limit, but as soon as there was a ceiling, I stopped experimenting with the music in their catalog and dropped the service.
Now, they're "relaunching" again with what looks like a smaller catalog, the same monthly restrictions, etc. I'm trying to see how this is better. Most likely an attempt to appear as a "new" alternative to iTunes, et al when in fact they've been there all along and are actually on a downward spiral.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Have they fixed their linux client? In the glory days of emusic, when downloads were unlimited, the client was compiled against some weird library that only red hat and mandrake had. They provided the library and a wrapper script for the rest of us, but I never could get it to work quite right. It would load, but couldn't fetch anything without a proxy server. It wasn't all that much fun.
If they've fixed the client I'm willing to give emusic another try. The selection is good enough that it's worth $.25 a track, and obscure enough that you're not likely to find it cheaper anywhere else.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I think this anonymous post was an advert.
Emusic used to be $9.99 per month and unlimited downloads, over a year ago. It was an absolutely amazing service and had me thinking that the world of digital music could be great for all parties.
I was wrong. Last Fall Emusic was bought out by some other company who changed the policy to the $9.99 for 40 or 50 tracks and its been that way for over a year. I cancelled my subscription.
After the annoucement was made, but before they switched formats, they pulled horrible stunts like not actually allowing you to download unlimited music (per their contract) but putting some aritifical cap on your downloading. They also used to incriminate people for downloading too much even though there was a unlimited deal in the contract. I started to lose respect for them.
I don't think there has been a relaunch. I think there is an executive at Emusic trying to get more business via Slashdot.
If you are reading this Emusic executive, bring back the old unlimited format (even at a higher cost)! Honor your contracts!
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
I was an emusic subscriber for the earlier part of this year, and it was pretty darn good. My only complaint is that I ran out of stuff to download. That is why I cancelled my account. I'm a big fan of indie music, but I found that there wasn't quite enough to keep me going. And new releases don't show up very quickly.
But, the revenue sharing program does give 50% to labels/artists, so I found that if I did have extra credits in a month, I would download albums that I had once (illegally) downloaded. This made me feel better about myself.
I lasted for about 9 months on the old emusic, and it was $100 well spent.
I was an Emusic subscriber, but they kept jerking around the users. They continually changed the terms of the service. And their support for Linux was pathetic/nonexistent. What confidence can you have that the service you subscribe to is the service you'll eventually get? They've changed horses in midstream several times in the past; why should I think they aren't going to jerk me around again? Has there been a change of management? That's the only thing that would make me think about going back.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
Uhh...
Nelly == Good Music
Brittney == Good Music
???
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
Ummm, this doesn't sound all that different from their last Re-launch. I was a subscriber when they were $9.99/month for unlimited downloads, and let me tell you how much I loved that (and how much stuff I downloaded). I am not a fan of this new model, but that might be because I already downloaded 8 gigs off of them for about $50.
/. crowd, but I never looked too closely at their third incarnation (the flat monthly fee was their second). This new launch might be different, but it sounds a lot like the last one.
Their selection is a combo of new, indie artists and great old jazz artists. There is a lot of techno, too. If you are into jazz or techno, or just like listening to interesting indie bands it is worth it.
This story, though, doesn't sound like anything more than a PR dump on the
IANAL, but I play one on
The poster has forgotten my favorite quasi-legal russian music service, http://www.allofmp3.com/
They have no DRM what so ever, so it's great for you Linux users. Also, it's based in Russia, so it lends itself to those classic Slashdot "In Soviet Russia..." jokes. (In Soviet Russia, Music DRM You!", sorry, the lamest I could come up with)
It also has the most complete catalog (including Beatles), is priced right at $0.01 US per megabyte, and has a multitude of on-the-fly encoding options, including ogg Vorbis, Flac and mp3 up to 384 kbps. (however, I think FLAC and other "premium" encodes runs you $0.05 US per megabyte).
Suposedly it's perfectly legal under Russian copyright law, as long as they compensate the artist directly. Perhaps it's just paying for illegal music downloads that you could otherwise get off Kazaa.
You might be interested in http://magnatune.com/ as well. It's also DRM free and half the money goes directly to the artist. Also there is no subscription fee.
We whine and bitch endlessly for and end to stupid, pointless DMR schemes. We pine for non-propritary formats. We wail when downloads are expensive.
And we complain when someone tells where it is.
You guys rock!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This is the first online music store that I will seriously consider. (and actually the first that I _can_ consider since I'm a linux user.
That's not entirely true. You can buy from Bleep.com, and it's basically the same thing. Non-DRM 192kps MP3s. You just have to like their selection (mostly electronic music on Warp Records). It's been up for a while now, and you pay per song (or album), not a monthly fee (which I prefer).
I did, however, get a whole bunch of George Carlin, T. Monk, and other collections before I jumped. That same stuff would take a year or two at 40 tracks/month.
Nothing to see, move along folks.
1 &categoryID=1198
and notify us of your intention to cancel your subscription
prior to November 8, 2003, your EMusic subscription will
convert into EMusic Basic. Under EMusic Basic, you will be
billed $9.99 per month for access to the service with no
minimum monthly commitment, but you will be limited to no
more than 40 downloads during your monthly billing cycle. "
I can't believe this makes 'news'. This is the same old crappy E-music as before.
For those who don't know, E-music had high quality VBR MP3 titles for download. Most labels would not license to them, so their catalog consists of mainly out of the maintstream / lesser known labels. In exchange for this less than up to date collection, they allowed unlimited downloads. That all ended in October 2003. First those who had the audicity to load up on the unlimited songs in large quantities quietely had their accounts cancelled.
In Oct 2003, part of the email they sent was the following:
" In order to respond to these ongoing challenges and maintain a compelling service for our valued customers, EMusic will be making a number of significant changes in the coming weeks and months. As part of these changes, we will be discontinuing the unlimited service plan and replacing it with a new service offering.
Unless you visit the link below: http://help.emusic.com/cu/index.cgi?cmd=step2&st=
So you can see, nothing has changed. Browsing their catalog the selection appears to be the same limited catalog. Their price point hasn't even changed. In fact, their same website stills has the same 'sleaze' factor. Information on the costs and limitations are not easily available from the front page. Clicking - sign me up for a trial - doesn't give much details until you give personal information.
The same limitations remain from Nov 2003. If you hit your whopping 40 tracks download in the month, thats it. There is no per song fee for each song over that.
Like I said, its hard to believe this qualifies as news. I wonder if someone was cleaning out their email and say Emusics email from Sep 2003 and thought it was 2004?
I am the last person to "promo" a record label, but I can't believe I haven't seen it on slashdot yet.
Magnatune
Free mp3 streaming of the entire catalog.
If you want, pay $5-$18 (you choose!) for an album download (40+ minutes) in mp3, ogg, wav, or whatever it is you like. Artist gets 50%.
If you want a physical cd, pay $15-$30 (something like that.. you choose!) and the artist gets 100%.
There is *no crap* in magnatune; all of their members are peer reviewed. It's solid.
I don't work for them or anything, I am just a very happy customer!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Now let me hit send and see how long it takes before the first, "Dude, your musical tastes blow," flame.
So do you have a Cheryl Teigs poster on your wall or Bo Derek?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
As a former subscriber I can say they are worth it depending on the type of music you listen to. If it's strictly mainstream then forget it. For me I spent nearly all my time in their classical and jazz catalogs. There's plenty of good stuff including lots of historical recordings by great artists/conducters etc. I was upset when they changed their pricing model. Being able to download all the tracks you wanted (well it was actually ~2000 per month but me being dial-up I never came close to the unspoken cap) was certainly nice but we all knew it wouldn't last.
Check out the link to browse their catalog that someone posted earlier in the comments. It definitely doesn't sound like much if you're used to downloading all you want from p2p. But if you already use pay sites it's a very economical way to try new music.
And as for why I'm not currently a member it's all economics. I plan to join again in the near future.
Oh and again if you're a jazz fan (especially if you like the great jazz pianists like Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Jelly Roll Morton etc) then you'll really like the service.
Well, there's no magic to "CD quality". It's just 1411kb/s linear PCM. At any given bitrate an MP3 has much better sound than PCM at the same bitrate. And don't talk to me about compression artifacts; linear PCM has compression artifacts too.
We don't encode MP3 much higher than 320 because naturally it's not possible to get better sound than was present in the original PCM data stream. If we had access to a very high-bitrate source, a hypothetical 1411kb/s lossy-compressed file made from that source would sound better than a CD... but you wouldn't have to go all the way to 1411 to beat the CD.
Point is, all sound recording is compression, some is better than others. And I'm just hassling you on the "no mp3 is better than a CD" line. A 192 of course isn't CD quality, but I'd challenge you to find much difference at 320.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Pfft... Forget it then!
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
Magnatune and AudioLunchbox also provide non-DRM formats (ALB has your choice of mp3 or Ogg Vorbis). ALB also frequently has sales, or gives away free songs, and while single tracks are normally a buck, whole albums don't go above $10. As others have pointed out, $10 a month is only a better deal if you actually do download at least ten tracks in that month. There just isn't that much good music out there -- better to pay only for what you do get, rather than what you might get.
Pancakes is the better part of valor.
Hmm.. let's see: Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Wes Montgomery....
Yep, these guys knew nothing about music..
I hope my sarcasm is showing..
...richie - It is a good day to code.
...when you buy digital music such as this, what proof do you have that you really own it?
I've got a large collection of music in mp3 and ogg formats on my laptop, ripped from my CD collection. I've often been worried about going through international customs at airports and having some over-zealous security nut decide to search the contents of my hard disk drive and then fast-track me to death row for DMCA infringement.
Now, at least with my mp3 collection, I can point to all of my CDs (well, at home) as proof that I own them. But if I were to buy mp3 files from emusic, what proof do I get that I really own them? Are emusic keeping records of all purchases and will they be willing to provide
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
Is it just me or does it seem like the Internet is trying to charge us for things we used to get for free?
Yeah...I remember the good ole days. Remember going to the binary bboards and "downloading" the pictures. Then I finally got UUEncode and could download the ~really big~ pictures. So you grab "babe_pt1", "babe_pt2", and "babe_pt3", merge them as you get ready to see some hottie and then realize you just wasted all that time putting together a picture of someone's pet pig. Such innocent days...and free.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Techncially, with a lossless compressor you can get down to ~ 700-1000 kbps and still have CD quality. The thing with MP3 is, yes, it's not technicalyl CD quality, but can you tell the difference? The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between a 128 kbps MP3 and the source. For all intents and purposes, for them, a 128 kbps MP3 is CD quality.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I use Audio Lunchbox, which lets you download in both 192kbit MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. I've also poked at Bleep, which currently supports MP3 and is thinking about FLAC.
Both of these are DRM-free and will give you files that work on Linux (or BeOS or PalmOS or an Amiga or a Newton or whatever).
no way affiliated with audiolunchbox.com, unless you consider rabid fan to be an affiliation.
--DRM free
--mp3s and ogg vorbis encoding (most tracks can be downloaded as ogg, there are a few that are only mp3s I think)
--independent music
--similar price scheme as iTMS
--bigger catalogue than emusic (in fact, most of the good stuff from emusic's glory days is on audiolunchbox.com)
--did I mention the no DRM
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
0.99 is way too much for me, IMHO, as I like to listen to a lot of songs relatively few times per. 0.25 is more like it. 0.10 is probably closer to the true value of your average song.
For the record, if TV were pay-per-view, I wouldn't spend more than $0.25 per commercial-free half-hour one-time-view. It doesn't sound like much, but any more than that and the prices take it above cable and rental. Again, 0.10 or less is closer to the value of your average TV half-hour show.
Well, it doesn't matter. The RIAA and MPAA have made a career of charging exorbitant prices for what is mostly crap-not-worth-the-time-it-takes-to-watch/listen, whilst royally screwing the artists, good or bad. As the IP laws strengthen this will only worse, and will probably only give them more ways to screw people (such as purchasers of blank media). Your tax dollars at work.
Most folks aren't bothered by piracy of this sort, because most people correctly consider recorded entertainment to have little or no intrinsic worth - the sort of thing that once upon a time you could buy for a song. If they really do like it, they pay.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
...sells unencumbered oggs and mp3:s, both around 192 kbps, your choice to download both or either. (I usually just go for the vorbis.)
I hate plugging stuff but it's a really small company, they don't seem to do much advertising, and, first and foremost, noone seems to have heard of them, and they deserve better than that. They've been great to me and they have stuff that's often hard to find on p2p.
I haven't even seen the catalog yet. :)
I thought I would check this service out quickly. I trusted them with my name, email, street address, and credit card #. Hopefully that won't come back to bite me in the ass. Anyway, I hadn't seen the catalog before giving out this info either. It didn't seem to be available from the free trial page I arrived at. Feeling adventurous, I took the plunge anyway.
As I suspected, the music selection is extremely limited, and of pretty terrible sound quality, despite being encoded at relatively high bitrate. The first thing I tried was a Bob Marley track "Sun Is Shining" from the "Natural Mystic" album released on the Avid label (not Island Records). It sounded like a cassette dub... really awful. It was MP3 encoded at 154kbps VBR, so the source must be the problem. I went to Amazon to check if this album was legit, and one of the comments there said it was a bootleg, and to avoid it since proceeds would not go to the artist's family. Strike One!
Wanting to be fair to the service, I only went for tracks of their "Featured Artists", figuring that they would have some quality control going on there. Bob Marley was a "Featured Artist", so they deserved that first strike. The next artist I tried was Moby. I thought it would be less likely that they would be ripping off an artist who was still alive... Well, I clicked on the "Moby" link and waited. And waited. Mozilla says: "Waiting for www.emusic.com..." After a few minutes, I gave up trying to score a Moby track. Strike Two!
Ok... I'm starting to lose hope. Let's give them another chance. I tried Willie Nelson next. Hmmm... still nonresponsive. Could it be that they've been slashdotted? Somehow I wasn't seeing thousands of slashdotters whipping out their wallets like I did, so I tried another strategy. I logged on from another machine. All of a sudden, things are pretty snappy again. Hmmm... what's up with that? Anyway, I tried perusing the classical selection. I couldn't really find anything exciting to listen to, and the search was difficult because they have everything arranged by sub-genre and album name, instead of composer. I did settle on a track from the piano recital of some dude I've never heard. It was ok I guess, but no way am I staying with this service I thought. It's just too lame. Strike Three!
Ok, game's over, or so I think. I click on the account link and wait. And wait. And wait... Oh Phew! There's the account page. I quickly click on the "Cancel" link. Still slow, but I'm relieved when the next page comes up asking the primary reason why I'm cancelling. All of the reasons are equally enticing, things like "I'm having technical problems" and "Not enough music in my favorite genre." I settle on one and click on the "Cancel My Subscription" link. Then I got this message:
Your eMusic account has been set to cancel at the end of this billing period. Your credit card will not be charged again (emphasis mine). If you have any downloads remaining, you may finish downloading them until the end of your current billing period.
Wait a minute! I thought this was supposed to be a free trial. If those mofos charged my card I'm going to go ballistic! I'm not so sure this is the kind of service that I want to encourage...
I'm reading the comments on this story and it seems no one has actually explained what the "relaunch" is about. Basically all it is that they have hired a new editorial staff, changed the interface, and added some new stuff like ability to see what other people are downloading. The "new" eMusic is simply a marketing push for an existing service that's been going for quite a while.
That said, I've been a subscriber of theirs for a couple years now, and I've been very happy with it. I had an account back when it was still unlimited downloads, and while I was a little pissed when they changed over to the more limited model, I stuck with the service. I don't know their reasons for dropping the unlimited service, but I assume it was because bandwidth isn't free and they couldn't afford to continue like that.
I've seen comments complaining that eMusic's selection is crap. If you mean it has no major labels, then yes, it's crap. However, that's not what they're aiming for. From their site:
"eMusic is the only digital music service entirely focused on serving the needs of independent music fans and independent labels. "
With that in mind, they have an excellent selection and they frequently pick up new labels. I have yet to run out of things I want to download, and I'm on the highest plan (90 songs a month). For me it's boils down to the ability to get music in the mp3 format and to find new interesting music.
Anyway, just wanted to put in a slightly more informed 2 cents...
As someone who got in on the ground floor at www.mp3.com the first time (and has since had his music relegated to the basement ) because of MP3.com's sale, I find this very exciting. I remember when The Orchard was ONLY selling CDs from their own website and thinking "man that sucks, I'm better off setting up a server with my own stuff on Kazaa" but now that's all changed. If you want to market your indie music online (and get into the www.emusic.com family), The orchard is the way to go.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with, nor have I ever been affliated with www.theorchard.com, but I will be joining now that I have found this link. Thanks Slashdot. I'm also not affiliated with Emusic (yet). Now my life has meaning.
-- Cheers!
- Playlists: If you listen to music in the background while you work like I do, then you've come across this problem. You heard a song you liked, but didn't look at its name before the next one started playing. How do you find out what you heard so you can buy it? Magnatune doesn't offer a playlist of the stream on their site.
- Searchable Database: Since there's no playlist you decide to search for the song. But you can't. There is no searchable database on their site. You must listen to each individual song in whatever catagory you think the stream was in while crossing your fingers and hoping you'll find it within the first 50 or so... Too much work, IMO.
- Customer Support: You really want that song, don't know what it was called and can't find it on their site, so you send an email to Punky, the Emailclown. The problem is that he doesn't respond. Any email stating "I am looking for a song played at x:xxpm write before (name of song I did catch). I have money and and prepared to give it to you." should elicit some sort of response - even a canned one. I've sent several. Even followups weeks later. Nothing.
I purchase music at Bleep [bleep.com] and Apple's iTMS. In contrast to Magnatunes, I have emailed Apple on several occassions and received replies. Both Bleep and iTMS allow me to search their catalogs. Magnatunes doesn't seem to want my business, so I'll spend my money elsewhere.I see Magnatune praised a lot here. Some of you even rave about them. But do you just select music randomly and get lucky? Or do you go there with certain musicians in mind? Aside from using them as a proof of concept in the noble fight against the RIAA, I just don't see how anybody who doesn't have a lot of time on their hands can use their service..
Fun with Inkwell | www.coo
Emusic's call to fame was unlimited downloads at a flat rate. For me, it was a simple service. All the music I want, don't ponder if a band is good or not, get it and listen to it. They would have continued to get my dollar every month just like netflicks does. Then Emusic put a low cap on the number of bands you can buy. Basically, they decided to charge $0.25 a song... which made the way I enjoyed listening to music worthless.
Look, I am not a music fanatic. I don't ponder laboriously over which CDs to buy. I don't read reviews, and for the most part I put absolutely zero effort into sifting the shit away from the worthwhile stuff. I treat music exactly like TV. I don't have favorite TV shows, I simply sit down on occasion and watch whatever happens to be on. I never sit down for a regular show. The only regular shows that I sit down for are the ones I get from Netflicks.com that I watch at my own leisure. To put it bluntly, there is more then enough entertainment out there that I don't want to waste my busy day having to look for it or sift out the shit from the worthwhile stuff.
If the Internet used the stupid pricing schemes that the music industry uses, that is to say that you have to pay open a webpage instead of a flat rate regardless of how many webpages you open, I wouldn't use the Internet.
Until someone uses a less asinine pricing scheme, I have all but given up on music. At best I go on the occasional downloading spree in a P2P. I am more then happy to shell out a pile of money each month for a service that simply gives me a massive bank of music to brows at my leisure. Until someone responds to what the market obviously wants, I will just spend my money on other media. There is a reason why Netflicks gets my dollar and Blockbuster doesn't any more.
There's an article about the legality of allofmp3 in the Sydney Morning Herald, at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/26/10828314 75556.html (registration probably required). Note that it's in the context of Australian law.
Quote from it follows:
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property.
His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?"
Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."