Russian MP3 Site

This Sydney Morning Herald article praises a song download company located in Russia. It's legal, costs just a penny per megabyte, and encodes the songs you want on the fly in a huge variety of formats. And they take Paypal.

Over the past few weeks, purely as a research project of course, we have downloaded from the internet 4.74 GB of MP3 music, which amounts to 968 tracks or 56 albums - from a collection of artists that ranges from Norah Jones through the Beatles, Janis Ian, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell to Miles Davis and Charles Mingus.

Had we been able to use the Apple iTunes music store - still not available in Australia - those downloads would have cost us US99 cents apiece, which works out to $US958, or about $A1300 in real money. On the Telstra music store, we would have been up for $1442, provided we were BigPond customers. Since we're not, our credit card would have had a $1829.52 work-out.

We weren't about to spend anything like that, but we also weren't prepared to do anything conspicuously illegal. We bought all those songs for $US48.65, or $66 in local currency, which works out, according to our arithmetic, to 6.8 cents a track.

You can pay a dollar, or you can pay a nickel. I must be those Russian copyright agreements.

There is no indication in our dealings with allofmp3.com over several weeks that this is one of those dubious enterprises so much loved by the Russian mafia. Our credit card doesn't seem to have been abused, and while we have no legal qualifications, we can't see that it fails to comply with the Berne Convention on copyright. According to the company, "All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution via internet, according to Licence # LS-3M-02-36 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society."

I've never swapped music, or purchased any online, but I thought I'd give it a try. I paypal'd $10, which sets up an account for 1 GB of music. At that rate you should get about 200 songs for your $10. I picked Norah Jones Feels Like Home in 192 kb/sec MP3 format, which comes to 4.52 MB and costs only $0.045. Then I found out it was the wrong song... I just don't have this figured out yet. But the site seems to work well, and I feel a little safer using Paypal than a credit card. Besides, they have William Hung's new album. Now how could I pass that up?

The site is http://www.allofmp3.com and you might want to blow $10 there before the RIAA goes nuts on the Russians. Then again, the Russian's have a nuclear arsenal.