Elbows Music Blog Community

Well, I'd say the fact that you aren't renting the music would appeal to a lot of individuals. It's an all you can eat buffet, instead of a trickle here and there. Yeah, there are places offering if for free in higher quality - but those are called torrents, and they aren't exactly legal, are they? I think it's a bit unfair to compare the two. It's like saying 'Oh, my doctor doesn't offer me much of a deal on my pain medication. I can go down the corner and get it cheaper from Jimmy the Blade.'. Isn't it apples-and-oranges?

I can answer that myself - 256 or 320 is not bad.

They should be offering them in flac I totally agree (in fact a full bunch of option like AllOfMP3 had a while ago). But this is at least a step in the right direction and for parents giving this to kids for Xmas seems to be a pretty good plan. Baby steps.

I never paid for anything with them as paying someone to steal music is a little ridiculous, but I did make use of their free signup bonuses of a few songs.
They were transcodes I agree, but in theory if the site was legally sanctioned and had the flac files as base material there is no reason that they could not offer you the choice of how you wanted it encoded. It would be a nice option that's all I'm saying.

Oh I agree, Tim. And for the record, my friend referred me on there so I had a $10 credit that I used (some of the HQ tracks were legit, but I'd say half were transcodes from lower bitrates). I had no idea what any of it was about at the time, and it was only once I looked into it that I realized it was just a bunch of Russian priates thumbing their noses at everyone.

Then again, a 'legit' site like Amazon sold me a transcoded version of Gnarls Barkley earlier this year, so I'm a little suspicious of everyone at this point.

Yeah I think the reason they didn't do monthly was that peeps would spend a month getting everything and then cancel.. at least this way they can get you for US160

Yeah the yearly is almost certainly so people don't buy one month, then leave it a couple of months, then buy another etc.
Most people want new music more than once per year, so a yearly solution could work well.

Yes for the first month you may download a few thousand mp3s, but after that the consumption would be relatively low, but at a steady stream. Also, most people already have a music library, whether they bought them on CDs, copied from a friend or downloaded them via Napster/Kazaa/Bittorrent/Rapidshare/etc - so even the initial bulk of downloads won't be that high for most people.

I'm interested to see where this goes to be honest. Yes it isn't as nice as or broad as What.cd or whatever, but it is a good start in my opinion