Woah! A four minute song for $0.12? Hook me up?!

So how come more people don’t use this service? Actually, a lot of people do. It was recently ranked second in popularity in Britain behind only iTunes, and it’s been gaining popularity elsewhere in the world as well. With these kind of prices, its newly unveiled music store software called allTunes which makes purchasing/downloading fairly easy (though still more difficult than the iTunes music store and less feature-filled than Napster), and it’s popularity… where’s the explosion? Where’s the commercials? The fanclubs?

Heck, I’d join the fanclub if it cost as much as a couple songs. The price is everything, but the price happens to be the problem. The dirty not-so-secret with AllOfMp3 is: it’s probably illegal. The AllOfMp3.com entry at Wikipedia gives a description of the service along with a rundown of some of the legal problems.

Let me summarize for you. For every song you spend at AllOfMp3, approximately zero cents goes to the artist. They don’t pay royalties, they don’t pay record labels, they don’t really pay anybody. I have no idea where they get the songs from, but basically you’re paying them to make you a copy of a digital file. Your favorite bands get screwed. They’ll go broke if you buy your music from this site.

If you don’t mind buying music from the back alleys of Russia, though, this site is your sweet sugar daddy.

As an example of the sick deal you get at this site, here’s what $10 can buy you:
• Panic! At the Disco – A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (full album)
• Koyaanisqatsi – Soundtrack (if you’ve never seen the movie this soundtrack is from, you should — minimalism at its best)
• The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (full album)
• George Winston – Forrest (full album)
• Jimmy Eat World – Stay On My Side Tonight (EP)
• five miscellaneous singles

And two cents left over! To buy the same on iTunes you’d have to spend approximately $55. Can you see why people like it?

To close this out, though: even though the store has great prices, buying music from Russian pirates will end up destroying the bands you love. Probably. If you like good music that isn’t Britney Spears. Y’know, smaller artists, smaller labels, smaller budgets.

Support the bands you love.

Update: The US government is threatening to keep Russia from joining the WTO if they don’t shut down allofmp3.com.