You may or may not have heard of allofmp3.com, which is an mp3 pay site hosted in Russia. I had heard of it, but had never seriously used it until today. I went there on a lark today wondering if they had any songs by an obscure (to me) hair metal band called Firehouse. To my surprise, they had five full albums’ worth. It costs anywhere from 10 to 25 cents per song from what I’ve seen so far, depending on filesize (which in turn depends on song length and bitrate). Here’s the cool part though — instead of straight downloads, they encode the songs on the fly when you buy them, which means you get to specify the format and the bitrate you want. Higher bitrates cost a little more, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I’ve been grabbing ogg vorbis files at 320kbs variable bitrate. How cool is that? They also have MP3, AAC, WMA, and MPC.
The downside to this method is that you have to wait a little bit between when you order the song and when you can actually download it. Fortunately, the downloads get stored in your account for 2 weeks before being deleted, so you can order some songs and grab them all later.
If you go for 192kbps MP3s dude, you’ll have it in 2 minutes flat. so eat it you you open source bastid, or i’ll GNUT on your face.