Clara Raubertas // Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston clara raubertas development. design. consulting.

Now that allofmp3 is no longer available, I don’t know where to buy new music. Allofmp3 was perfect — inexpensive, DRM-free, convenient to download, and it even let me buy music in my favorite non-proprietary format. But alas, such perfection went hand-in-hand with questionable legality, and US users can no longer add money to their accounts.

Since I manage my music collection on a computer, buying music on CD would require tedious additional steps of ripping the music to my hard drive and leave me with an inconvenient physical artifact. The iTunes store isn’t compatible with my computers’ software or the OS I prefer to run on my iPod — I refuse to by any kind of DRM’d music, anyway, since DRM means you don’t really own your music. I tried eMusic, which is where I got most of the new songs on this mix, but their selection was constrictingly small, and their pricing scheme (different subscription levels get you different numbers of per-month downloads, that expire at the end of the month) created some perverse incentives. Amazon and Yahoo! sell DRM-free music, but at $1+ a song it’s a bit pricey for me (perhaps the conclusion to this dilemma is that I can’t actually afford to buy much new music!).

Mostly I’ve been listening to Pandora and music I already have lately, but if anyone knows of an alternative place to buy music that doesn’t have the issues outlined above, let me know!

Tags: drm, music

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