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Online Music Stores Compared
prostoalex writes "DesignTechnica has a comparison of the leading online music stores. With the variety of services available they only concentrated on several top ones. Conclusion? 'If you simply want to download music from the charts, then Yahoo and Wal-Mart are your cheapest options. For your MP3 player, there are several options, with Yahoo the best of all. If you're an iPod owner... then you're stuck with iTunes.'"
The article was good, from 10,000 feet, but I thought it missed a few points.
Musicmatch is owned by Yahoo - why is it different? (Yahoo Music engine is a 3 meg download for Windows - a tiny player with pretty good functionality, especially compared to Napsters memory hogging skinned Windows Media Player).
With the Windows Plays for Sure stuff (Yahoo, Napster to Go) it only transfers to a Plays for Sure portable. While the article briefly touches that mentioning it's only a handful of players now, they should have specifically called "Doesn't work with iPods!" As someone already noted in the comments, iPod has 80-90% share of the portable MP3 market.
And last but not least, licenses. With the exception of Yahoo (I believe), if your hard drive crashes you lose your license for tracks you've purchased for 99 cents each. Gone, poof. Like losing a CD. You'd think that buying a song online, they'd have a record of your purchase and let you re-download, but no.
I've used most of the services, except iTunes on a Mac, and if Yahoo puts some marketing muscle behind YME they have a shot at 2nd place and displacing Napster. They offer the same functionality for less than half what Napster and Rhapsody try.
As a Linux only user, I'm contiually frustrated by my lack of music buying options online. I suppose I should try out SharpMusique as an iTunes interface one of these days.
Ifyou're gonna pay all that money to "legally" download/buy your music, you should probably do it with a service that's ACTUALLY LEGAL, which AllOfMP3 is not.
Actually legal?, Where?. IIRC where [I suppose] you live it is legal to DOWNLOAD music, although it is illegal to SHARE [upload] it.
Now, IIRC again, in Russia [where this service is given] it is legal [maybe it is not fair but it is still legal and, you know some laws/practices in the US that are not fair but again, they are LAW].
So, when someone is downloading a bought music file from allofmp3.com they are not doing anything illegal.
So, could you explain me where is the "illegality" of this?
Cheers.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
If you are talking about the U.S., importation of an allofmp3 download, or any other recording sold under IPR laws different form our own, for personal use is explicitly not illegal.
There is extensive documentation of the legitimacy, legality, and safety of e-commerce transactions with allofmp3.com. Russia is a signatory of the Berne Convention, and alloofmp3.com pays the required fees to the licensing authority in Russia.
Why are you so ready to accept the RIAA's definition of "legitimacy?" Do you have any independent and supportable evaluation of allofmp3.com's legitimacy?
[From beginning of article] ... ... since Apple turned the iPod into a necessary fashion accessory ... To be fair, Apple did a superb job with the iPod and iTunes by making it easy for people. And, by making the software proprietary, they made it a lot harder for the competition; what you downloaded from iTunes wouldn't play elsewhere. ..."
... If you're an iPod owner....then you're stuck with iTunes. ..."
"
Online music has come a long way
Read carefully, you see either a predetermined bias (fine, it's in everything we read and the wise know how to look for it) or misunderstanding of the topic (not fine; he's offering advice here).
iTunes is a software product that runs on Windows and Macintosh computers. You can't download music "from iTunes". What he means is downloaded from the iTunes Music Store with the iTunes application on your PC and I would be fine with that if he just said that once, at the beginning of the article, but he doesn't. Most people are more careful to differentiate between the iTMS and iTunes itself.
"
You know, he writes in such a nice, matter-of-fact style that even after reading the entire article, I'm not sure whether it's bias or ignorance we're reading. But, for the record, the iPod will play pretty much any music format except ogg vorbis and WMA audio, you can get music files from any source, including some of those listed in the article, and iTunes-the-software will happily import and play other formats on your computer or upload them to your iPod, whereupon you can happily enjoy them just like any other mp3 player.
One place I used recently has been Magnatune.com.. they are teh good.. .5 to the artist, .5 to Magnatune)..
(price per album $3 -> ?? (you decided)..
thier downside if they don't have the huge selection you'd expect of alot of places.. but IMO if you check out thier licensing scheme and the formats you can D/L (VBR MP3, VorbisOgg, FLAC, raw WAV, and AAC) it outweighs that.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Probably for the worse, however I still enjoy it.
.WMV format using Tunebite and back into MP3 so the music is *mine*. Yahoo's Music Store ALSO recommends music to me based on the same ratings I've made over the last three years, and I see the technology of recommending songs getting better and better as my choices are getting more broad, and now with the Music store, even easier to acquire. Before the YMS, I would listen to a song on Launchcast and then scour the P2P networks or the web to find the song to add to my collection. Many times, and I'd say more often than not, I would go out and buy the CD.
:)
I have long since been a subscriber of Yahoo's Launchcast -- their internet radio station that could play music based on your ratings. And as a work day went on, I would tag songs 1, 2, 3 or 4 stars, or even "Never Play Again". Yahoo would learn my tastes and has since then, recommended countless songs that I'd never have heard before. Bands like Nightwish, Evanescence, Lacuna Coil are bands I heard of before many, many people.
Now with the advent of the Yahoo Music Store, the same great benefits exist except that I can put them into my MP3 player and take it all to go. I admit freely however, that I convert all my music OUT of the
Now I'm paying a low monthly fee ($4.99 prepaid one year in advance) to get my grubbies on all the music I can handle. And probably, there are people that take advantage of the $5 price a LOT more than I do. But as a casual music listener, who is always looking to find new types of music that might pique my interest, Yahoo's Music Store has nailed my needs on the head solidly, and I'm glad to pay for that benefit. If you don't want to pay $5 a month to get unlimited downloads, then the RIAA has a good reason to go after you; however given their greed they want to come after me as well.
Oh well... at least if they bust down my door I can prove I'm legit
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
To be fair, you're really just pirating music and paying for the bandwidth costs. I download from www.allofmp3.com and from www.mp3search.ru for individual songs and for full albums, but I don't kid myself and try to believe that I'm supporting the artists or the, *ahem*, poor recording companies by doing so. The RIAA probably can't shut them down right now since in Soviet Russia mp3 site shuts down you. If they ever do, however, and seize their records, all of us are in big trouble since they have our credit card numbers. Might as well stick to the free methods if you can help it.
Oh I never said that it was illegal in Russia. In fact that's exactly why it's still operating right now. But if you look at a quote in the article (and you're good at decyphering Engrish), it gives you the clue to the RIAA's possible next plan:
I can confirm the legality of allofmp3.com You can legally buy/download mp3-songs from this site if it does not breaks the law the national legislation of the country in which you will be during that moment Sorry for my english.
All it will take is the RIAA to make downloading mp3s of songs which the hold the copyrights for illegal, and then they make your ISP monitor this and then they nail you for downloading anyway. Of course, that's probably a little far fetched, but it still serves to support my original point which is that you are downloading music from an unauthorized distributor and the RIAA would be more than pleased to stop that in one way or the other.
About that, look at this other post where I cite the breakdown of a USD$15.99 CD:
$0.17 Musicians' unions
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties
$0.80 Retail profit
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit
$2.40 Marketing/promotion
$2.91 Label overhead
$3.89 Retail overhead
So, pretty much the artists are not being really paid too much, as anyone can tell you, where artists earn is in live performances. So, my opinion is that each RIAA CD people buy is only giving money to them [the RIAA] and almost nothing to the authors.
If people really want to support their artists they should go and watch them LIVE.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Nope, they are not in violation.
d e17/usc_sec_17_00000602----000-.html
http://assembler.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/usco
So long as purchasing from all of mp3 is legal in Russia and the US purchaser intends to use it for their personal use everything is fine.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Why is it BAD to have vertically aligned Windows/IE/Office and GOOD when its iPod/iTunes?
Vendor lock-in is vendor lock-in.
I can't put Yahoo music on an iPod and I can't put iTunes music on my RCA MP3 player. I can look at anybody's HTML in IE, and I can look at RTF generated from Office in other office apps.
Is this just a case of: MS, bad; Apple, good.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern