In this day and age, with the consumer being treated like dirt, whenever a company launches an offer that is actually good, it’s such a revelation. One such revelation (of which there are few), I discovered today, is allofmp3.com. I’m actually in awe of these Russian entrepreneurs. So let me tell you why that is.

1. They let you preview a track before buying in low quality (this is actually disappointing, because you have no idea how it really sounds).
2. They let YOU pick the encoding you want, among all the most widely used formats. How amazing is that?
3. All content is usable (no DRM).
4. The price of a track depends on the the sound quality you pick (ie. you pay by quality), but the prices are generally low.
5. Their collection is wide enough to carry albums that I actually want.

To give you a concrete example.. The other day I was raving about “Chevaliers de Sangreal” from the Da Vinci Code movie. I search for the album on allofmp3, they have it. The price for this track (at 192kbps mp3) is $0.18. I put it in my basket, I set the encoding to FLAC lossless compression, the calculated charge is $0.71. Meanwhile, Apple’s iTunes Store, as far as I know, charges $0.99 per track (I cannot verify this as the store is only available through iTunes, which of course, has no linux support).

Granted, their payment system is a bit of a pain. They make you transfer a minimum of $10 into your account before you can buy anything. And I had to do this through a different site, even had to use my cell phone to retrieve a pin code they sent me. But, if you’re a frequent customer, just transfer $100 in one go and you won’t have to do this for a long time again.

The one drawback I’ve seen is that while they keep track of the tracks you’ve bought (no pun intended), they won’t let you re-download them. So once you download, keep it in a safe place (like backup to CD/DVD).

The average album on allofmp3 costs about $2.50, that is 11x, E-L-E-V-E-N T-I-M-E-S, less than the average album in a music store in Norway, at 180kr ~ $27 (perhaps Holland is a bit cheaper, I rarely go to music stores anymore, I wouldn’t know). And for that you get tracks at 192kbps (which is fine for most music, soundtracks and classical is more demanding music, I might get that in higher bitrates or FLAC), and you can buy per track. Not to mention that I never use CDs, because mp3s are so much more practical (and even if I did I could burn the CDs myself). Give me one good reason why I should ever buy another CD again.