Prince

I'd like to hop on the bandwagon of downloading music from the web with a clear conscience, but all the services I know of are outrageously overpriced. Why am I supposed to pay close to a buck per song for albums which I can get used from Amazon for less than 5 bucks per disc - booklet included?

Surely there has to be a decent music download service out there... What do YOU use?

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chrisg299

(Kind of off topic) Eh I recently bought Rhapsody($25.00) from the local Best Buy, it's not a bad program has 30,000+ songs I believe, has a lot more bands than I had imagined when I first purchased it. First 10 tracks you burn are free, every song after that is 79 cents. When you buy it you're automatically subscribed to it for 3 months and you can preview any of the cd's in the program and make playlists etc etc w/e you want for the first 3 months. Not a bad program if you're confused about considering to buy a specific cd but don't know if it's worth it Anyway, yeah, I like it :P! (Did I mention it's totally legal too? haha)

rubicon

Um, then why don't you just buy the CD from Amazon and get the booklet? But once you add shipping, doesn't it get closer to $8-$10 a disc?

The real question is what do you want to pay for a song?

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brandon11983

I buy CD's. When they upgrade downloadable music to bit perfect, then I'll consider it. You don't save much by downloading albums, and you get more (liner notes, bonus discs...) when you buy them.

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Speed_Gibson

I just stick with buying vinyls and the occasional CD unless a site offers downloads in a lossless codec, preferably FLAC but Shorten works for me too.
I purchased a concert from livephish.com without even knowing that much about them just to try them out because they offered a 90 minute live concert with full liners included at the very reasonable price of $12. Also nice not to have the hassle of the CD and just FLAC files to backup on CD/DVD.

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Black Adder

Prince

The artist whose albums I am interested in buying (all of them), her discs sell around 1-2 bucks + s/h on Amazon, so it ends up around 5 bucks or less. That's not bad.

But the thing is, I don't need the booklet or the disc or the plastic cover. I'll rip the songs into mp3 files anyway for playback on an mp3 player. I don't listen to the actual discs. If you pay a buck per song, you're paying for the booklet, the disc and the plastic cover - none of which you get.

Something between 20 and 30 cents seems reasonable.

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cliche

I'd have a look at allofmp3 - it's a Russian service which works on the fact that Russian law allows ROMS (their equivalent of the RIAA I think) to negotiate on behalf of all artists whether they want it or not. So you get your tracks legally (I think - I read a few reports on law discussion boards that said it's all above board, if rather irritating to the RIAA) and quite cheaply.
Plus side is that they'll encode it into anything you like - mp3 with your favourite settings, ogg, or even raw CD data. You pay by the megabyte rather than by song, so better quality is more expensive - but still much cheaper than the competition.
My GF and I have been using it for a bit and it seems pretty reliable, fast and good quality.

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rubicon

It seems you're still getting a better deal from Amazon, excluding the shipping.

I use iTunes - I buy singles from time to time and it's easy to move them between my Mac and PC.

I'd rather buy the CD because I can rip the tracks in whatever format and bit-rate I want. I only buy the singles if I'm unsure about the entire CD.

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choskins

I just bought the new Beastie album for $9.99 at Best Buy. With 15 songs, it would be $15 to download. I will stick with buying albums.

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Prince

I took a look at AllofMp3 and it's beautiful. I can choose the ripping format and bitrate, and only pay for the bandwidth. I've already downloaded one of the albums I was looking for. About 10 songs, cost about 40 cents. Awesome tip, thanks cliche!

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