Anyone know any unambigously legal downloads site anywhere in the world where you can get MP3s of major artists? All anyone seems to offer here is DRM encoded WMAs which are doubly useless - 1, you cannot transfer them to other media so when your hard drive goes down (and it will) you'll have lost the lot and 2, my mp3 player can only play mp3s anyway.

Allofmp3.com is brilliant, but they (and we?) are being watched...

Yeah I love allofmp3 - doh!!!!

There's no such thing, I'm afraid. DRM and major artists seem to go hand in hand.

Obviously it depends on just which artists you like, but http://www.bleep.com , http://www.tunetribe.com/ and http://www.wippit.com all sell legal, legal mp3 downloads.

mp3000 is worth a look.

The main reason i use allofmp3.com is the choice - if i want i can have an mp3, WMA or even a WAV file of the music.
My main problem with some of the UK based downlaod sites, is that theres only one choice - a low quality reproduction.

Shutting dopwn allofmp3.com is not the answer, the best solution would be a price hike - which i would be willing to accept - as long as it was not too much.
CD Albums in the shops currently cost between £10 and £16 ( the last album i bought was Stadium arcadium for around £13 - online prices should be below those of the Physical CD - so for instance an album thats available for £10 should cost £6 online as a high quality file
( ie Wav or simalar ) - with each track costing a sub division of the price (ie 10 tracks on a £6 album - each track £0.60p

The price should also be reflected in the Quality of the track, so a high quality high bitrate track should cost the full amount (60p) with lower bitrates being cheaper.

allofmp3 is completely illegal - giving even more money to Russian criminals is a bit of a weird solution - instead of giving them your credit card details you may as well use coventional P2P channels.

Thanks for the suggestions. Wippit looked interesting at first, but when you search for a lot of stuff it just comes up as WMA only and at £0.99 per track it's not very competative either. Still, at least it's a start, maybe it will get better with time, or get more agressive competitors using the same sort of model.

I agree with Richard_T that the choice both of artists and format / quality is what makes allofmp3 so good. Also paying by file size is both easy and fair.

I'm not at all sure about the russian mafia thing, that does sound a bit like propaganda put about by the BPI. If it is true I wouldn't use it again (of course), but I think we all deserve a bit of evidence first.

If allofmp3 could legally sell their music for about 50p per 3 1/2 min track (at 192k) I'd never dream of going anywhere else. But until some major artists / record companies are prepared to not use DRM, I can't see it happening...

I don't know about any mafia involvement - but artists receive zero royalties from music sold by allofmp3

http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/...d.php?t=393290

Just posted about AllofMP3 there.

You don't give them your CC details if you don't want to - I use PayPal which is secure enough. They probably have my address, but that's online in dozens of places (192.com etc) anyway.

If any other site used no DRM, better quality and wanted much more money I'd use them. If AllofMP3 go and it gets hard to do it, I'll just buy CDs from ebay. Jamiroquai for 40p last year, £1 postage, had it in a few days and ripped to the PC in a few minutes in my chosen format, bitrate etc. Why would you pay several quid on iTunes for the same thing.

I didn't realize PayPal was an option... but anyway, I'm quite suprised people are OK with allofmp3.

If I was a musician I'd prefer my fans to download and enjoy my music for free than buy it from those guys.

Actually as I understood it, royalties are paid, and these are split 50/50 between a Russian trade body and to the artists themselves. However, they only pay for the master rights - ie the recordings themselves - and nothing for publishing rights (the songs). So with the low prices involved, it amounts to not very much for the artists, and nothing for the song publishers.

Can't remember where I read that of course!

The American Amazon site has loads of free downloads available here

They claim to have been paying the neccesary royaly collection agency in Russia - but even if that's the case it doesn't look like the money has got much further than that.

Here's Side-Line's brief summary.


Anyways...enough about AllofMP3 from me, I was starting to rant a bit last night which is not so good.

I've got a large amount of truely legal free music, saying that I'm not into top 40 etc, but their is alot of free & legal music if you know where to look.

As above I use both Amazon.com (sign in with your UK user name & password) & http://www.download.com/ also have alot of free music & my personal favorite which offers far more than music is http://www.archive.org/index.php

Other sites you might like to look at
http://www.peoplesound.com/music/pop/?artisttypeID=2
http://www.mp3songs.org.uk/
http://www.jamendo.com/uk/
http://www.celticmp3s.com/
http://www.goingware.com/tips/legal-downloads.html
http://creativecommons.org/audio/

... and sometimes you can just be browsing around and find a whole album available legally and for free from a band's web site

Thanks for that Inkblot,

something else I meant to say is P2P can also be used to find creative commons licenced music, although if was sharing my PC with a 13 year old etc, I'd avoid P2P.