Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

AllofMP3 the Way of the Future for Online Music Sales?
I signed up for an account at the notorious Russian online music emporium today, and despite some moral reservations as to how they are doing things, I can help but think that this is on of the first online music stores to get things right.

I particularly like how they charge more on the basis of the bandwidth required to download the files than anything else. I contacted the enoweb online store that was selling downloadable versions of Brian Eno's more obscure albums, asking what bitrate the tracks were encoded at. The reply I got was "the industry standard 192kbps", which doesn't make a whole lot of sense for an artist whose atmospherically dense works require something like a minimum of 256kbps (or preferably 320kbps), to fully appreciate. It would be like being asked to listen to a classical album fed through an AM radio. Ugh. (To their credit, They Might Be Giants have got it right, offering their songs as un-DRM hampered 256kbps downloads -- I am a satisfied customer of theirs).

My qualms about signing up with AllofMP3 have more to do with ensuring that the artists are compensated in some way, which seems dubious after taking a harder look at how they operate (seemingly by using a loophole in Russia's radio broadcasting laws). But from what I read it also appears that even on those download services wholly on the up-and-up, the artists are being gouged once again by the recording companies. That doesn't make AllofMP3 better, but it does underline where things are still very badly out of whack for everybody (meaning: consumers, artists) but the recording industry.

So I am trying to restrict my choices primarily to out-of-print (am currently listening to Blancmange's "Happy Families" album which I haven't seen in stores in CD format ever) or import albums, but I'll admit that this doesn’t make it fundamentally better, save in the sense that my spending can be seen as putting my money with a service that delivers what I want as a consumer: reasonably-priced tunes, no Digital Rights Management encumberment, and at a bitrate that doesn't make the tunes sound like crud when played of anything other than an iPod.