Let me start off by making it perfectly clear that I while I don’t illegally download software, music, or videos I have decided to take step into the gray area when it comes to my music. Let me explain…
I’m 45 years old and like to listen to music in the background. While I primarily listen to classic rock, I also listen to many other genres as well. I also spend a significant amount of my listening time listening to music from the past. I only occasionally listen to new music.
For these reasons, I chose iTunes as my online music store of choice. The subscription service does not work for me. If I were to listen to new music and wanted to continually experiment, they might have more appeal to me. The iTunes music service seems to have a reasonably large selection of music, in fact the largest of the music services, and I have downloaded several hundred songs.
Lately, I have been listening to the music through my headphones. I own a pair of Shure e5c headphones and they seem to amplify every nuance in the music. The quality of the music downloads from iTunes seem to be inferior to the CDs I own. While investigating this issue, I found that the bit rate of the iTunes music downloads are fixed at 128bps. My research shows that to maintain CD quality I would have to encode them at a bit rate of 320bps.
While it may not seem like a lot, my library of 2403 songs is completely encoded at 128bps. All but 235 of those songs are from CDs I own. Those 235 have all been purchased from iTunes. It saddens me that I will likely have to re-encode the CDs. It maddens me that I am screwed when it comes to the iTunes music. I have paid $0.99 for each one of those and now have to either purchase the CD, live with the distortion, or pirate the music. Or do I…
I have heard about AllofMP3 for at least a year or so. It just was not something I was interested in since iTunes was providing 100% satisfaction to me. Since I now am in need of a better way to download music, I thought I would take a look at their web site. As I mentioned above, I have no intention of pirating music, or any other media.
AllofMp3 allows the customer to select the bit rate of the download, encodes the music to that bit rate, and then charges you accordingly based on the size of the file. Higher bit rates produce larger download files. Longer songs also produce larger download files.
I decided that the only songs that I will download would be songs that I have already downloaded from iTunes. I am just trying to get cleaner, clearer versions of the songs.
I’m sure your first thought is that I am now going to pay twice for the same music. While that is true, the price of the music from AllofMP3 is close to 25% of the price of iTunes. I can now regularly download a song for $0.27! If you were to compare 128bps downloads, the AllofMp3 price is only $0.17 per track.
There is also an added benefit from using AllofMP3. There is no Digital Rights Management(DRM) on the music. I can freely copy the music to any player I have. Of course this also means that I can give away the music to 10,000 of my closest friends, but I would not do that.
The real question is whether this service is legal or not. At this point, it does not appear to be illegal. AllofMP3 is a Russian company and claim that they are following all of the rules of their country. This includes sending royalties to the artists. I certainly can not substantiate the claim that they are legal, but I have heard the Record Industry Association of America(RIAA) has tried unsuccessfully to shut them down. My belief is that if the RIAA was able to shut them down then the company was genuinely operating illegally. The fact that they are now trying to concoct a reason for the illegality tells me that AllofMP3 must have found a loop hole or that they are genuinely performing legal activities. Until that time I am going to consider the service NOT ILLEGAL. I am not willing to say that the service is legal. If the RIAA comes up with a way to shut AllOfMP3 down or declare it as illegal, I will have to stop using their service.
Am I a software pirate? I am going to say that I am not. Based on the previous paragraph, I am not convinced that the site is illegal. Even it is determined to be illegal, the only downloads that I have made are to music that I have already paid the ‘vig’ to the record industry on. If AllOfMP3 is accurate when they say they pay royalties to the artists, I will have done so twice. If any official wants to see whether I have legal music or not, I can show them the receipts from iTunes showing that I did buy the music.
What am I going to do in the future? I think I will continue to use iTunes to listen to my music but I will have to think long and hard about purchasing any more individual tracks from them. I may have to go back to purchasing the CD until iTunes allows for higher bit rates on their music downloads. I suppose that I could still purchase the song from iTunes and then turn around and purchase the same song from AllOfMP3. That would increase the price of a song from $0.99 to $1.26 and give me what I feel is a legal high bit rate version of the music. I suspect that this will be a decision that is determined on a case by case basis.
207.7
Posted by swfields at August 30, 2006 11:53 AM | TrackBack