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Gone are the good 'ol days of freewheeling music sharing. The recording industry is cracking down on illegal sharing. Even if you still use a file sharing network, the quality of the downloaded songs can vary greatly. Sometimes the song you downloaded is a fake or just silence.

Today, Napster is a legit company. Dozens of sites including iTunes, MSN Music, Rhapsody, and even Walmart offer music downloads for about a buck a song. But I bet there's one download service you've never heard of: AllofMP3.com.

AllofMP3 is a lot like the other music download services. Find the songs you like, pay for them, and then you can download them to your computer. But, AllofMP3 is cheaper - A LOT cheaper.

Instead of charging you per song, AllofMP3 charges you per megabyte downloaded. And, one megabyte costs $0.01. No, that's not a misprint. One cent per megabyte. Since an average song at decent quality is around 5MB, it will cost you about a nickel per song.

Now, take a breath. I know this sounds too good to be true. But it's not. I've downloaded dozens and dozens of songs and I still haven't depleted the $10 credit I paid.

By now you're probably saying to yourself, "This can't be legal." Well, technically it is. AllofMP3 is based in Russia (as you can tell by the homepage and from some of the translation on the site). Russia, like every other country in the world, has its own copyright laws that are different from those in the U.S. AllofMP3 conforms to all Russian laws. The site pays fees to the Russian organization that regulates the distribution of copyrighted material. There are obviously lots of technicalities in regard to copyright law and the fact that every country is has different only adds to the confusion. But, the bottom line is that AllofMP3 is legal if you download the music for personal use. AllofMP3 has been around since 2001 and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has not filed any lawsuits against it.

So how does AllofMP3 do it so cheap? Part of it is the exchange rate. Because there are so many Russian rubles to the American dollar, 5 cents per song in Russia is almost the same as the 99-cent songs sold in the U.S. Using AllofMP3 is a lot like going to Russia and buying a Britney Spears CD for $1 and then bringing it back home to the U.S. with you. This is completely legal. Now you can do this virtually over the internet.

At this point, I'm sure you're thinking this is great and all, but who in their right mind would pay money to some obscure site in Russia? Incredibly, giving your money to AllofMP3 is safe too. Before I bought music from them, I scoured the web to find people that got burned. All that I found are people that love the service. Museseeker, a site that reviews music services, reports that there have not been any complaints with AllofMP3. The site's credit card processor is internationally known. If you don't feel comfortable giving them your credit card, you can also pay using Paypal (although at this writing it was temporarily not available), prepaid cards, and gift certificates.

If you've read this far, now you're probably thinking that AllofMP3 has a catalog filled with Russian-only music. While probably not as large as iTunes or Napster, AllofMP3's catalog is extensive. And it grows every day. They carry a wide variety of music that has something that will suit everyone's tastes.

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