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On the heels of my iTunes complaints..
Michael considered fate at 12:53   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment
Comes a new link at slashdot to this australian article about a new russian music download site called AllOfMp3.

The amazing thing here is the business model. You quite literally pay by the megabyte - which as I have said before makes a heck of a lot more sense to me than paying by the song (should I have to pay the same 99 cents for a 2 minute song as I do for an 11 minute song, all else being equal?). To be questioned, though, is the price. Currently they are charging the price of 1 USD cent per 1 megabyte of traffic (sometimes 2 USD cents for "Exclusive", whatever that means). At this price you could download entire albums in MP3 format for less than a dollar. In fact half A DOLLAR. Or, if you so desired, you could crank up the quality of that album to double that of your average MP3 and still likely come in under one dollar. OR you could go lossless for a few bucks. Your choice. If you're a crazy audiophile you could even download a full on CD in CDDA format and it would be in the range of $5. Now that sounds more like it (no pun intended).

So how are they managing these prices? Who knows. The article linked above goes into some detail and it sounds (somewhat) legit, legally speaking. So far the australians who tried the site out haven't had their credit card abused, they haven't had their door knocked down by australian copyright police, and they downloaded some 5 gigs of 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. They did it all for $48.65 USD or, as they roughly calculated, 6.8 cents a song.

Sure, the site doesn't have quite the catolog that some online music stores do (they boast 173,000 tracks to iTunes Music Stores' 700,000) but at these prices who can't afford to at least attempt to bargain shop? Plus, for a russian site, the english is readable and the site design is fairly professional looking.

Who knows if this will last but hullo! These are prices consumers will appreciate. Plus, prices like this will facilitate the downloading of full albums (one complaint many artists, record companies, and even fans have about digital music downloads is that it encourages single track downloading and due to this there is a fear that the album as an artform will quickly go the way of the dodo bird).

Anyhow, if my gut has any sense, this won't last.. but it'll be interesting to watch for now anyway.

Did I mention they take paypal?


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