allofmp3.com

A lot of news sites is covering allofmp3.com's 1Mb / 1 US cent download service. I subscribed and spent $10 and have been happily downloading music since. They are suffering under a bit of load with lots of server busy messages, but it's understandable given the attention they are receiving.

The story was first carried by the Sydney Morning Herald who spoke to a legal type that had the following to say:

We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property. His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?" Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."

First thing I got was the Wolfsheim that I had issues with earlier followed by some rare Einsturzende Neubauten that I am finding hard to even find in the usual basements in Camden.

The quality is great, they keep the files in WAV format on their servers and you get to choose mp3, mp4, ogg or wma and the desired bitrate. Higher bitrate = bigger files = pay more. This means you get to wait a bit for your downloads to be ready, but you can easily feed it into wget or something like that to fetch once they notify you by email its all ready for the taking.

Here's hoping it lasts.