After having heard a lot of good things about allofmp3.com, and visiting their website a couple of times over the last few weeks and discovering another album that I wanted on every single visit, I decided to give it a go. Here’s a report of my experience.

Allofmp3.com is a Russian company that sells music online, much like iTunes and the new Napster. The big difference with those two (and other companies that are based in Western countries) is the price. You don’t pay allofmp3 per song, but per megabyte that you download. The price is very low: only 0.01 USD per megabyte for compressed music (I’ll get to that shortly). That means that for most albums, you pay less than one dollar! Now that’s a price that I’m willing to pay for online music.

But that’s not the only advantage of allofmp3 - what sets them apart from others too is that you can choose in what format you download you music. They offer mp3, WMA, AAC and Ogg Vorbis, but if you prefer, you can also download uncompressed files! For that service you pay not 0.01 USD but 0.02 USD per megabyte, but for that you can choose between wav, FLAC and a number of other lossless compression formats. The files are all encoded on the fly for you; when you’ve selected which albums or songs you want to download, you go to the ‘checkout counter’ and wait a while until the conversion is done. The files in the queue and those ready for download are visible on your member page on the website, so you can keep an eye on that page or indicate that you want to receive an email as soon as the encoding is done by checking a checkbox in the order process.

What about the choice of music? Although they are Russian, their selection offers a lot of Western music. It ranges from old and classic like ABBA and Bob Dylan (I won’t comment on which of these two is the old, and which the classic ) to modern and very recent (the Robby Williams compilation CD is very popular apparantly). It’s useless to discuss tastes in music here; you can go browser the catalog yourself to see if there’s anything to your liking. I was pleasantly surprised to find classics like Dr. Dre’s ‘The Chronic’ and NWA’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’ as well as an album that I’ve listened to a lot over the past few weeks: Dido - Life for rent (as an aside, I saw her live two weeks ago in Ahoy, Rotterdam and it was great; if she ever performs somewhere near you, you should go!). I even saw things like Thievery Corporation and Gare du Nord in the catalog, which are not very mainstream (at least not here in .nl) so that says something about how much music they have available.

So, cheap, easy and plenty of choice, but what about legality? Allofmp3.com has a licensing agreement with the Russion equivalent of organizations such as the RIAA in the USA or Stichting Brein in the Netherlands. They can legally distribute music, roughly under the same agreements as radio stations in Russia need to broadcast music. A lot of people question the legality of importing those files into countries where we have to pay more for music than 0.01 USD per megabyte, but there is (until now) no legal obstacle to do that (that is, in most of Western Europe and the US; I have no reason to believe it would be different anywhere else in the world).

What are the steps you have to take to get music from allofmp3.com onto your harddisk? When you go to their website, the first thing to do is create an account. They ask you a bit of information on the username you prefer, what password you want, where you’re from and your email address, and after clicking ‘OK’ you get the message that a confirmation email has been send to the email address you just gave them. Nothing unusual, when you read the email they send you (it only took a few minutes for that mail to reach me) you’ll find a link to a confirmation page. After clicking that link you’ll be asked for your username and password again and if that check works out your account is created and ready to go. You’ll be directed again to the homepage, but you’re not logged in yet - you have to enter (yet again) your username and password. All in all a straightforward process.

When you create an account, you get 10 MB of download for free, so you can start downloading a few songs right away. But 10 MB isn’t a lot of course, so what you’ll probably want to do is put some money into your account. I can hear some readers cringing over the thought that they’d have to send money over the internet to a Russian company; I mean, who hasn’t heard the stories of Russian crackers extorting money from e-commerce sites by stealing credit card data, or even worse (for the consumers), ordering expensive electronics online with that stolen data?

Allofmp3.com takes payments in the following forms: VISA credit cards using Cyberplat.com as an intermediate, Paypal and WebMoney. The Paypal service was down at the moment of writing (1st November 2004) and I’d never heard of WebMoney before; I think that of all the options, VISA will be the only realistic one for most people (except if you live in Russia because then you can pay by wire transfer). Cyberplat.com apparantly has a good reputation in online payments; I’ve searched the web but I haven’t been able to find anyone who reported having troubles with fraudulent payments after using allofmp3.com. But you will have to make the choice yourself of course.

If you can set yourself over the fear, the way to increase your balance is easy. After you’ve logged in, go to your account page, go to the MyBalance tab and click ‘New payment’. After selecting how you want to pay and how much (I choose 1 GB of data for 10 USD for the first time) you’re directed to the website of cyberplat.com where you can enter your credit card details. This way, allofmp3.com itself never even has access to your credit card data; maybe another comforting thought. The whole process is a lot better than what I’m used of in most Dutch online shops and even better than in US online shops that use Paypal for their credit card payments (you can use Paypal but the process has never worked for me without making a Paypal account). The processing is done instantly; after checking your balance sheet you’ll see the money you just deposited show up.

Now all you do is browse the catalog and click ‘order selected songs’ to add them to your shopping list. Like I said before, when you go to the checkout counter you can choose in what format you want to download your music. What I really liked is that they cater to the power user as well as the beginners; when you select mp3 as your format you get another choice on the quality. Of course, higher quality = bigger files, which means that you can download less of them; that’s a tradeoff you make. You can select ’standard’, ‘high quality’ and another, even better one (but I can’t remember at the moment what they called it). Anyway, it means 128, 192 and 384 kbps, respectively; they have a complete section in their help pages if you don’t know what that means. But, and this is the good part, you can also choose an ‘advanced’ mode where you can select more bitrates, whether you want fixed or variable bitrate, and even which coded you want to use! (lame or bladeenc). Now if that’s not great then I don’t know what is.

So you’ve selected which music you want and in which format, and then you can download the files from your profile page. But that’s still just a normal webpage where you have to click every link seperately; surely there has to be a better way? Ah yes, there is: you can download a (Windows-only) application that you can use to browse the catalog, fill up your account, order music and best of all, download files in batch! You can set the directory to download to, what version of ID3 tags you want, what you want the filenames to look like and off you go.

So aren’t there any bad things then? Well, the interface takes a bit getting used to; you have to have gone over the whole process once to see things like ‘aha, this is where my files will show up’. That’s hardly the website’s fault; there’s a first time for everything. It would have helped if the English would have been ‘native speaker’s English’; although it’s not that bad, it still shows that it was writting by someone who speaks better Russian than English. The downloadspeeds that I got (20-30 kbps) are acceptable; it’s not super fast but better than Kazaa (and roughly the same speed I get from bittorrent) and it’s reliable with their download manager, so you can just let a download run overnight.

So, to conclude: I love allofmp3.com and I think this is really the future of downloadable music. The price is good; at this price, it doesn’t matter if I lose some files, I’ll just buy them again; and it’s a price for which I can say to friends ‘hey I’m not going to bother to burn you a copy of this cd - just download it yourself’. The selection is great with new albums added every day; the download speeds are doable even for several albums at a time and the user interface gets familiar very soon. But don’t take my word for it, try it out! If you have any questions, leave a comment or mail me directly.

Disclaimer: I’m in no way affiliated with allofmp3.com. I’m just a happy customer and I’d love to see them get bigger, in the hope that their catalog will grow faster Now as long as the Big Five don’t bully Russia into changing their copyright laws or the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society into changing their licensing policies, I’m happily downloading a couple of albums every week