I have known about this service for quite some time, and have been hesitant to try it out. The site is based in Russia, and that fact alone was my primary concern. I don’t want to get into all the details of that statement, as you can probably figure the meaning out by yourself.
I have bought CDs this year. I bought one or two at Wal-Mart. I bought around 12 from BMG. Overall, I’d say I spent around $80 for about 15 Cds.
I don’t listen to music as much as I do talk radio. I subscribe to GlennBeck.com for about $60 a year. The reason I mention this is because I get about 2 new hours of downloadable audio from my subscription to glennbeck.com every workday. I listen to it once, and delete it, unless it’s got something in it that sticks out and makes me want to keep it. I have that option, and it’s perfectly legal.
Doing a quick little calculation, I find that I’m spending about 23 cents a workday to have the ability to listen to about 2 hours of entertainment. Compare that to an average cost of $5.33 per CD I purchased this year. In total, throughout the life of the CD, I’ll probably listen to it 20 times. That comes out to about 27 cents every time I listen to the entire CD if I listen to it that many times. Most CDs only last for just under an hour.
Itunes, MSN Music, Wal-Mart.com, mp3tunes.com, and almost any other online music store will charge you around $1 per song. Allofmp3.com charges you based on how much bandwidth you will use. I just purchased 5 CDs from their site at 192kbps quality LAME MP3 format for under $7. At a count of 60 songs, that comes out to about $0.12 per song, without any DRM. I can keep them and play them my 20 times without any problems. The best thing about the site, is it is completely legal.
I think I may build a computer to just play all of my music nonstop from now on. I may not even hook speakers up to it. I think I’ll just keep it connected to the internet and playing music all the time. On the other hand, maybe I’ll hook up some headphones to it.
In the meantime, I think I’ve found my source of music until something better comes along, or I get bored with music altogether.