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.
That’s the apparently insane price proposition that a Russian site called allofmp3.comoffers its customers. You buy your music by the megabyte, at the rate of 500 MB for $US5 and you dial in the sort of encoding you want: MP3, MPEG4-AAC, OGG, MPC, WMA etc at various bit rates using different encoders _ say the LAME alt-presets. If we were prepared to pay more for the bandwidth, we could elect to have the music encoded with lossless algorithms, giving us the same quality as the original CD.
Computers at allofmp3.com encode them on the fly and spit out the files, at an impressively fast rate. It will even email you when they’re ready, or you can use their software, Allofmp3 Explorer, to manage the transfers. The software – like everything else on the website, from the catalogue to the order and payment mechanism – is surprisingly well written and professionally presented, the range of popular music is vast, and the quality of the music is at least the equal to anything we’ve heard.
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.”
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