Legal music site: 5¢ a song !?!?

[srobert]

Extract from the article:

A Russian online service may well have figured out how to do digital music downloads right: make tracks cheap and available in any format customers care to select.


The site, allofmp3.com, was discovered by Sydney Morning Herald reporter Charles Wright who claims to have to have downloaded a DVD's worth of tracks - 968 of them, to be precise, all from big-name artists - for just under $50 (AU$66).

Assuming all the songs were available on, say, Apple's iTunes Music Store, they would have set the fellow back over $958.

The Russian site charges by the megabyte, offering 1MB of downloads for just one cent. You bulk buy download capacity. Add $5 to your account and you can download 500MB worth of music. The site claims to be legal, having licensed its content from the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society - licence number LS-3M-03-79, the site says.

Many of the songs are stored as uncompressed files, and the site will encode each track in your favourite format - MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA and so on - at your preferred bit rate. Hence, presumably, the per-megabyte billing rate - the better the quality of the song, the more expensive it is and vice versa.

—> Link to whole article - Click me <—

 

[MongoTheGeek]

Thats the problem with teaching the world capitalism. They learn the lesson too well

Odds are the downloads are legal in Russia. You are probably liable for customs and I am not sure what the rules are for reimportation. There will be some icky court cases over this especially if the Russian government decided that this is a good thing and backs up the people doing this.

 

[baby duck monge]

regardless of the legality of this particular site, the idea is wonderful, and i'm sure many people here would be enthusiastic about having lower, but variably priced music depending on quality. that way, you can download just what you want, in whatever format you want, at whatever quality you decide works best for you. wonderful!

 

[Dippo]

regardless of the legality of this particular site, the idea is wonderful, and i'm sure many people here would be enthusiastic about having lower, but variably priced music depending on quality. that way, you can download just what you want, in whatever format you want, at whatever quality you decide works best for you. wonderful!

While that is true, there are certian record labels that would never allow it to happen.

But being able to download a loseless 30MB song for only $1.50 isn't too bad, of course a 5MB song would only be a quater (what music should cost!)

I checked out the site, but they didn't seem to have any recent or good music

 

[Dippo]

Sorry DP.
Macrumors is having some problems or something...

 

[baby duck monge]

While that is true, there are certian record labels that would never allow it to happen.

But being able to download a loseless 30MB song for only $1.50 isn't too bad, of course a 5MB song would only be a quater (what music should cost!)

meh. just because the record labels don't want people to do it doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good idea. it's a wonderful idea, it's just not going to happen here.