How can I tell if an MP3 site is legal?

Sites selling MP3s range from well known sites such as iTunes that charge for music to others that claim they are legal and charge as little as 9 cents a track. I want to purchase music legally - how can I tell?

Also tracks I have purchased from iTunes have annoying metallic distortion. Is this commonplace?

As p-c says, if the tracks are cheap then they're probably illegal. Anything with the .ru domain is probably also illegal. I would try googling the name of the site and see what comes up.

Napster is legitimate in some countries, not all though. In Germany and the US for sure, but for example not over here in the Netherlands.

So it appears there are two issues - legality and ethics. A country may have laws that don't prevent dodgy operators so users have to be happy that royalties are going to bands.

Another problem with legal sites is the range of music available. Any recommendations?

wow, this is a new one on me . . . illegal downloaders actually pay for their songs? What is the point, when one can get them free and just as illegal?

Edited by p0mt3 - February 27 2008 at 22:19

Here's some lists of legal download sites:

http://www.riaa.com/toolsforparents.php?content_selector=legal_music_sites

http://kidsmusic.about.com/od/digitalmusicforkids/tp/legalmp3s.htm








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^ it was a misunderstanding then ... your post immediately followed mine, so I thought you were replying to what I had posted.

As far as your question is concerned: At least in Germany in know from many forum discussion that people use illegal pay sites like allofmp3 for two reasons: 1. In order to avoid the risk of prosecution when using illegal file sharing, 2. to ease their conscience. They're paying a small amount of money for the downloads (about 1/10 of what you would have to pay regularly) and they simply ignore the fact that this money does neither go to the artists nor to the record companies. I don't understand it either ... but some of the people I discussed this with would rather give their money to a Russian criminal syndicate than to a big music company. Their usual argument is that the music companies only give a small percentage of CD/mp3 revenues to the artists ... but on the other hand they're not using websites like cdbaby.com either ... there the mp3 downloads are relatively pricey, but the money goes directly to the artists.

Quite hypocritical if you ask me ... both supporting illegal file sharing and using illegal mp3 stores is massively hurting artists IMO. The only illegal practice which I still support is to swap some songs with your buddies in order to find new music ... but even that has become pretty much obsolete now that there are sites like myspace.com or last.fm. The new Amazon.com download pages are great too ... you can listen to high quality samples, only 30 seconds of each track but from the middle of the track, and for a 10 track album this is really sufficient for you to get an impression of whether you might like the album or not.

@Angelo: It's strange how you put it ... Napster is completely legitimate, the problem is that the service is only available in a few countries. For many other music services it's even worse - they're only available in the U.S. or *maybe* in the UK, such as Amazon's new mp3 download or subscription services like Rhapsody or Yahoo Unlimited.


Edited by MikeEnRegalia - March 01 2008 at 03:54