I'm a loyal user of the iTunes Music Store (222 tracks and counting), but there's a lot of stuff they just don't have.
Say, for example, I have a sudden and irrational craving to own a copy of Lindsey Buckingham's "Holiday Road" (yes, the song from the original National Lampoon's Vacation). Where can I go to buy it?
I honestly don't know and it really bothers me. I figure there must be a few great places, but I just don't know any of 'em. If this was the year 2000, I'd just grab 'em off Napters, but the era is long gone. I don't mind paying for this stuff. I've done so 222 times so far. I just don't know who to give my 99 cents to this time.
Help?
(Oh, just FYI: John Hughes and Harold Ramis are both gods.)
Posted by jzawodn at November 28, 2004 10:04 PM
This is so cool: a Russian company is using legal loopholes to offer legal MP3 downloads for 5 cents apiece. I've been using it for a couple of months.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/28/russian_music_service/
Hey Yahoo just bought a company you should check out ;) MusicMatch. They have the same model as iTunes - download their client, then pay $0.99/track, $9.99/album. I've found one or two things I couldn't find on iTunes, but dunno your tastes and if they are any better for that. We really need an uber-search that searches all these services. you should talk to that search team of yours.
Hypothetically, it's still possible to download peer to peer on limewire (limewire.com) and Kazaa Lite (you have to search, make sure you get Lite, the regular version is spyware-laden).
Also sony has a download site (musicstore.connect.com) as does Napster (napster.com) as does msn (music.msn.com).
uber-search (or as uber as there is now AFAIK): http://www.mp3.com/
p2p client: http://www.aresgalaxy.org/
MusicMatch.com doesn't care about Mac users, so I don't care about it. And anyway, why should I need to download Yet Another App just to buy music? I buy stuff with my browser all the time.
P2P networks are more than hypothetically still useful. Gnutella, E-Donkey, et al are alive and well. And using them is less "bad" than buying tracks from a russian site that takes your money and doesn't give it to the artists, imo.
Someone said it first, but I'll say it again. From Russia with love: www.allofmp3.com (isn't the dubious English charming?) I've been a semi-regular user for months, and haven't yet had my credit card used to buy or sell vodka.
If you're interested, I've written about my experiences with the Russians (and others have offered some informative comments):
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/000940.html
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/000955.html
I found it on EDonkey. Nicotine is a rather good app for EDonkey on MacOS X.
BTW, I did a little research and apparently this song is not on any Buckingham Nicks album, it only appeared in the NatLamp Vacation soundtrack. It's got to be pretty obscure, just for that reason.
I saw Fleetwood Mac live in 1976 and I'll never forget Lindsey Buckingham opening the set, blasting out a rocked-out version of the song Bare Trees, standing in front of a row of 4 Marshall 100 amps. It was deafeningly awesome, even in the outdoor amphitheater. I was sitting in the 2nd row and I could see right up Stevie Nicks' dress.
www.emusic.com is pretty sweet and rich if you are into alternative/indie stuff.
I have used Ares before and its pretty good. No spywares on my machine atleast :)
If I were you, I'd start my search here: www.gofish.com
As long as everyone is peddling p2p software, I really like Acquisition (www.acquisitionx.com). Built for MacOSX, its a really slick shareware, worth the $15 you have to pay after the trial period is over and you want to do away with the popup reminder.
It integrates so nicely with iTunes that its cinch to download a song and have it go automatically into a Playlist in iTunes. Give it a try sometime...
http://allofmp3.com/ -- Supported file types: Mp3, Wma, Ogg, Mpc, FLAC, Monkey Audio, Mpeg - 4 AAC (iTunes compatible)
i hereby second emusic.com. not sure about their OS X support, but it's a flat monthly rate for n# of free , DRM-less MP3's.
great selection of indie/non-mainstream stuff.
as for holiday road, they don't have the lindsay buckingham version, but they do have a good cover by dirt bike annie.
HTH.
soulseek is worth a try- it has an OS X and Linux Python client called Nicotine
http://nicotine.thegraveyard.org/
Lopster is another one worth checking out , although its Linux only.
http://lopster.sourceforge.net/
The curious thing about Lopster is that unlike other P2P networks, it connects to small localised sub-networks with limited membership levels. It's a strange concept, but worth checking out - you dont always manage to get into certain networks, but when you do , you can get pretty much anything. It's kind of like a super-decentralised P2P network.
Thanks for the link to www.allofmp3.com that place rules. It's just what I was looking for!
I guess I fall in the same category as Jeremy, but I am also curious of services for Linux... obviously, the kind of service that doesn't provide their music in .wma format, y'know?
Aaron
i forgot to mention the excellent Bleep site by Warp Record - if you want esoterica , hard to find, electronica , then this is place to go to:
http://www.warprecords.com/bleep/
cool thing about them is that you get an MP3 , rather than any DRM protected rubbish.
