Legal Music Downloads
Discussion
Well I've toyed around with a few sites now, and so far iTunes has been the easiest to use.
However.
For the last couple of hours I've been looking around www.allofmp3.com , an entirely legal pay site that lets you download in whatever file format you want, in whatever quality you want.
The library is extremely good, with many songs I have been unable to source elsewhere. And you wouldn't believe how bloody cheap it is, compared to the rest.
Highly recommended, I'm downloading some eighties classics that I can't get on iTunes, at 7-10 meg per file because I specified 320kb!
>>> Edited by parrot of doom on Sunday 27th March 00:20
>>> Edited by parrot of doom on Sunday 27th March 00:20
However.
For the last couple of hours I've been looking around www.allofmp3.com , an entirely legal pay site that lets you download in whatever file format you want, in whatever quality you want.
The library is extremely good, with many songs I have been unable to source elsewhere. And you wouldn't believe how bloody cheap it is, compared to the rest.
Highly recommended, I'm downloading some eighties classics that I can't get on iTunes, at 7-10 meg per file because I specified 320kb!
>>> Edited by parrot of doom on Sunday 27th March 00:20
>>> Edited by parrot of doom on Sunday 27th March 00:20
if its that cheap, you have to ask yourself, wheres the money coming from to pay for the Royalties.
The artists certainly want them..
was reading before that it cost apple $1.44 per track on average, and at $1 sale price there were running a huge loss, but mitigating it with the massive iPod profits...
all the rest seem to price their tracks at £1 / $1 a hit.. 11 for $2, well, you tell me.
The artists certainly want them..
was reading before that it cost apple $1.44 per track on average, and at $1 sale price there were running a huge loss, but mitigating it with the massive iPod profits...
all the rest seem to price their tracks at £1 / $1 a hit.. 11 for $2, well, you tell me.
JamieBeeston said:
The artists certainly want them..
You'll find it's the record companies that want the money. Most artists would be happy to make a decentl living off their music, but it's the record industry that sucks every penny it can out of the customers to make themselves and the artists disproportionately wealthy. The music scene would be far healthier if artists earnt £50kish max per album.
agent006 said:
The artists certainly want them..
You'll find it's the record companies that want the money. Most artists would be happy to make a decentl living off their music, but it's the record industry that sucks every penny it can out of the customers to make themselves and the artists disproportionately wealthy. The music scene would be far healthier if artists earnt £50kish max per album.
Tell that to all the Artists who spend £50k on half a party
and whilst you're at it, tell it to all the footballers, agents and managers too
ScoobZ said:
www.exeem.com
Tis quite good.
if you want some legit places, heres a Few I deal with first hand.
www.DJDownload.com
www.TrackITDown.net
Legal and Legit
JamieBeeston said:
JamieBeeston said:
The artists certainly want them..
You'll find it's the record companies that want the money. Most artists would be happy to make a decentl living off their music, but it's the record industry that sucks every penny it can out of the customers to make themselves and the artists disproportionately wealthy. The music scene would be far healthier if artists earnt £50kish max per album.
Tell that to all the Artists who spend £50k on half a party
and whilst you're at it, tell it to all the footballers, agents and managers too
That really depends on the artist. I hear word from the states that artists often get told by their RIAA member (Record Industry Assoc. of America) studio that they will not recieve any profit from the singles they sold, and to get their income from touring. This is limited if you are not considered a "safe" artist, i.e. one that may not be appropriate for the preferred target audience on 13 year olds who spend the most money of any demographic buying music.
Number 1s usually start out as something a focus group in Clear channel, who own a large proportion of the american radio stations, who then play it all the time and annoy people with it. They will often select their choices from things the RIAA has sugested to them. They will play it over an unsafe artist so this artist is not going to expect much revenue from clear channel owned radio stations. This artist then has trouble getting touring venues as most of the major american ones have contracts locking them to using ticketmaster for handling ticket sales, and ticketmaster have considerable persuasive powers concerning what artists are booked. Ticketmaster are owned by clear channel, the circle jerk continues.
The situation has become such that older music fans, who may not want to listen to eminem and limp bizkit all the time are getting brassed off and downloading what they want from the net, including from many smaller artists. The more financially stable of the downloaders, if they find something they like often spend money buying merchandise and singles from that artist and the artist makes money as the smaller artist is using a small independant record label and is therefore cutting the RIAA out of the loop.
The problem now is they figured this out a few years ago and started suing everyone under the sun claiming the downloaders are costing them money they were never going to make anyway. The RIAA dont seem to like being told by their potential customers what they want after so many years of the RIAA telling people what they want.
The original networks used for trading files are IRC and newsgroups, which, are text based and not used by the ignorant masses as it requires a certain krypton factor to use properly. They went for easy targets first. Napster, in its original incarnation, relied on central servers to handle negotiating the sharing of music. Napster was also based in the US and they had no problem shutting it down. Kazaa, Morpheus et. al. rose from the ashes based outside the US. This was harder to shut down so the RIAA started targeting its users, and the users of IRC and other less popular mediums such as direct connect. They sued at random and making an example of them. This included everyone from a 13 year old girl who ran a direct connect hub and a grandmother. People took no notice and someone replied in kind by defacing the RIAA's website and started using it to distribute a Metallica album (Metallica are pretty much used as poster children by the RIAA) Kazaa et. al. were all taken over by a single company (Sharman networks, iirc, in australia), loaded full of spyware, and the protocols changed so the old versions would no longer work. People started using kazaa lite, which was the kazaa client with the spyware gutted and repackaged, and continued using it. Another peer to peer protocol appeared that was open source called gnutella. This worked in such a way that it does not require a central server and makes the users hard to trace, but it can be hard to locate the songs you want in return. Recently sharman networks was busted by australia's anti piracy groups in a joint venture with the RIAA. The RIAA are now working over Bittorrent trackers. Bittorrent not only has no central server, but those who download become servers themselves. To start downloading you require a .torrent file, hosted by a torrent tracker. The tracker does not host the files themselves, but essentially tell you where to download it from. The RIAA have shut down two major trackers, Suprnova and Lokitorrent, but are having trouble with Pirate's bay, based in Sweden. Swedish copyright law states that piracy is illegal but telling someone where to obtain pirated material is not illegal, therefore torrent tracking is legal. Furthermore Pirates bay are posting the threat letters they recieve on their main site as well as their somewhat comical replies. The RIAA are currently working over the server logs of Lokitorrent, which they seized, picking targets to sue. They are most likely going to go after the seeders, i.e. the people who started the torrent in the first place although anyone who used lokitorrent is at risk of being sued.
This is the situation as it stands regarding file sharing, and the reasons why it has more support than meer freeloaders looking for a cheaper way to get music
Free MP3 Downloads, completely legal:
www.artrocker.com
www.drownedinsound.com
www.thecrutch.net {may be .com, cant remember}
www.artrocker.com
www.drownedinsound.com
www.thecrutch.net {may be .com, cant remember}
parrot of doom said:
11 songs downloaded so far, at a cost to me of $2.074
Thats pretty damn cheap, and no I don't care where that money goes.
How do you know before you sign up how much it is likely to cost.
I'd like to buy a few albums I already own on MiniDisk which I can't get off the mini disk and onto my computer.
At about $1.50 per album at the above costs I can live with that. But if they all of a sudden want $15 per album then I won't be bothering.
Is it to do with the age of the track (eightes vs. contemporary) or the download length and quality?
Andy
"Gizmodo is running a story from a reader tip that claims that the russian site Allofmp3.com, popular with slashdotters for their user selectable format which had been reported as being under investigation recently has been let off the hook by the Russian DA, becuase of a loophole in russian law which allows users create copies of songs by request. Basically, even though the courts have found their site operator's behavior to be illegal- they can't prosecute because the user dynamically creates copies of songs to be downloaded themselves."
parrot of doom said:
Well I've toyed around with a few sites now, and so far iTunes has been the easiest to use.
However.
For the last couple of hours I've been looking around www.allofmp3.com , an entirely legal pay site that lets you download in whatever file format you want, in whatever quality you want.
The library is extremely good, with many songs I have been unable to source elsewhere. And you wouldn't believe how bloody cheap it is, compared to the rest.
Highly recommended, I'm downloading some eighties classics that I can't get on iTunes, at 7-10 meg per file because I specified 320kb!
>>> Edited by parrot of doom on Sunday 27th March 00:20
>>> Edited by parrot of doom on Sunday 27th March 00:20
Been using it for about 6 months I think.
It used to be £10 worth for 1000 songs though these days you pay the bandwidth, it's still excellent value its just like browsing Amazon, except you say I want that and it starts downloading in the little explorer prog.
With my 2meg connection
I get downloads donig 190kb/s!!! 
awesome... Also worth it as it downloads to your Music Directory and then places it in a directory by the artist name , then the album... and the ID3 tags work properly so your car /winamp knows what it's playing etc!
>> Edited by chris_freebie on Sunday 27th March 17:15
andytk said:
11 songs downloaded so far, at a cost to me of $2.074
Thats pretty damn cheap, and no I don't care where that money goes.
How do you know before you sign up how much it is likely to cost.
I'd like to buy a few albums I already own on MiniDisk which I can't get off the mini disk and onto my computer.
At about $1.50 per album at the above costs I can live with that. But if they all of a sudden want $15 per album then I won't be bothering.
Is it to do with the age of the track (eightes vs. contemporary) or the download length and quality?
Andy
You don't pay per album or song, you pay per 'bits downloaded'. So if you choose to download some songs at low mp3 quality, you pay less. If you download a new album (say, Moby's new album) at CD quality (and it really is CD quality, 600-700MB!), you'll pay a lot more.
For 10 dollars at 320kb mp3, you could easily get yourself 4 or 5 albums.
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