We signed up tonight with the Russian music service Allofmp3.com.
Selection: Decent, not great. Slightly worse than iTunes Music Store. Much less non-pop music, which is saying a lot. That said, there’s extensive back catalogue stuff, including the Beatles (take that Apple Recs!). Lots of Russian stuff (TATU!), which, from my experience, tends to be horrible. Lots of Sonic Youth (13 albums), hardly any Pavement or Yo La Tengo (one album each). One Stereolab. No GBV.
Interface: Clunky, but useable. A bit slow today, but that may have to do with the Slashdot onslaught. Selecting how music should be encoded is a bit confusing, but this may be inevitable.
Pricing: You pay by the megabyte, either 1 or 2 cents per. Songs work out to be between 3 and 10 cents, generally. $10 buys one gigabyte of downloads. In other words, fill an iPod for $200 to $400 (or $40 for a mini), versus about 10X that at the iTunes store. You can pay by paypal, which means that you don’t have to send your credit card information to Russia (which would have been a deal-killer). One drawback: you have to give them a working email address. No spams…yet.
Quality: Really good. You can go from low-quality mp3s to FLAC (ie, lossless). I’m going with MP4/AAC at either 192 or 320 kbps, depending on source complexity and whim. I have about 200 songs from the iTunes store right now. I would have twice that at least by now if it offered higher-quality. Obviously, it costs more to d/l bigger, higher-quality songs, but what’s a couple more cents/track?
Legality: No idea. The idea is that their Russian licenses (probably compulsory, or else the record companies would pull out so quick…) are in order and that since Russia is a party to whatever international conventions apply, it’s legal. Well, maybe. Analogy: you can buy a CD in Russia and bring it back to the U.S. But maybe that’s a poor analogy. Better analogy: bringing an obviously bootleged DVD to the U.S., which won’t get you in trouble (so far as I know) but don’t sell it yourself.
Morality: Dubious. Artists are obviously getting little or nothing for this.
Risk: Little, if any, credential-theft risk, assuming that you use paypal. Little legal risk, probably, though I don’t doubt this will be shut down in a few weeks. Risk aversion strategy: purchase bandwidth in small lots only when needed to reduce risk of losing prepurchased bandwidth when service is closed.
One tip: Queue up a bunch of downloads. Go to the download page. Click the link for a list of download URLs (at the top of the page). Copy the list. Past it into a download manager like Speed Download on OSX, which will then download one at a time (or more, if you want) until all are complete. This is much easier than downloading one at a time via your browser.
Their software: Allofmp3 has a download program, but it is Windows only; I am not trusting enough to touch it (trojan? spyware? who knows.), but fortunately, it’s unnecessary.
Download speed: Acceptable: 15-25 kB/s (could be slow because of Slashdot). Per usual, queue songs before bedtime.
Bottom line: Good thing 80 GB, 2.5-inch laptop drives will be out soon.