AllOfMP3 Music Store: A better way to buy digital music

Imagine a digital music store that lets you choose your bit-rate and file format, and then encodes your music into that format and uploads it to you. Imagine a digital music store that charges you $0.01 per megabyte of music ($0.02/mb as of January 15, 2005).

This is AllOfMP3.

Choosing your own bit-rate and file format is exciting enough. I prefer 192kbps MP3s, but I could have chosen up to 384kbps WMAs, OGGs, MPEG4-AACs, or MPCs instead. You can even use advanced LAME encoding settings like -alt-present standard! But lets put the pricing into perspective.

Here is an album that is probably available on any digital music store around: Sarah McLachlan's Afterglow.

192kbps(high quality) MP3s of all of the tracks on that album add up to 55.4MB. Thats $0.55 for the entire album downloaded legally. Compare that to the extremely rights-limited files of similar quality from iTunes Music Store for $9.90.

Then look at song previewing. Any digital music store I've seen until now provides 30 second song previews of all music in their library. AllOfMP3 goes a step further, providing 24kbps streaming or downloadable "previews" of the entire song.

If you want legal digital music, this is now the only way to go.

Think this can't be legal?

"Russian copyright legislation allows phonograms to be performed publicly without the authorization of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission. (Article 39) The Internet could be deemed to fall under this exemption. The copyrights involved have to be paid to a collecting society.

Allofmp3 has signed agreements for this with Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems (ROMS). According to license № ЛС-ЗМ-02-36 the Internet-project www.allofmp3.com, has the right to use musical compositions by providing downloads. Under the license agreement Allofmp3 pays out fees to ROMS for downloaded materials that are subject to the Russian Federation Copyright And Related Rights Law.

ROMS is a member of CISAC (www.cisac.org) - the International confederation of authors and composers societies. ROMS manages intellectual rights in the Russian Federation. All third party distributors licensed by ROMS are required to pay a portion of the revenue to the ROMS. ROMS in turn, is obligated to pay most of that money (aside from small portion it needs for operating expenses) to artists. Both Russian and foreign."