“‘6.8 cents a song doesn’t even cover the royalties that other services pay to record labels, which makes me highly suspicious of the legality of the content they are selling,’ Jarad Carleton, an IT industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan in Palo Alto, California, told TechNewsWorld. Tired of paying 99 cents a track for your music downloads? Try paying for them by the megabyte,” John P. Mello Jr. reports for TechNewsWorld.
“An online store based in Moscow is selling music downloads by popular artists like Norah Jones, Usher, Prince, Outkast and scores of others for 1 to 2 cents per megabyte of song.
What’s more, the downloads are free of restrictions, and you can choose their format: WMA, AAC, MP3 or even direct copies of CD tracks with so-called lossless codecs,” Mello Jr. reports. “Paying by the megabyte for music can result in huge savings for consumers, according to Charles Wright, a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.”
Mello Jr. reports, “In an article published in the newspaper, Wright disclosed that over a period of a few weeks, he purchased 4.74 GB of MP3 music — about 968 tracks — for US$48.65 from the Russian site, Allofmp3.com. A similar buying spree at Apple’s iTunes store — which isn’t available Down Under — would cost US$958, he wrote. Something that good must be illegal, right? Apparently not.”
“According to Museekster.com — a self-described legal music services portal — Allofmp3 has signed an agreement with an intellectual-property watchdog group, the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems (ROMS), which gives the Web site the right to sell music downloads,” Mello Jr. reports.
Full article here.