russian mp3s

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

I can’t keep this to myself any longer. I lasted a week but that’s it. My brother give me the tip off in an email the other day and asked if I wanted to get really cheap mp3 downloads ‘cause there’s this site see, and it’s cheap. It’s just like iTunes he says. Except it doesn’t cost as much.
“Cheap?”, I say.

“Yes” he says.

“How cheap?”

“Is 1 cent a megabyte cheap enough for you?”

“Holy shit.”

I had a peek and it looks for real. Does it look legit? Not sure. Will it last more than a week? Well, apparently it’s been around for a year, so who knows. How can this place sell at this price? I have absolutely no idea.

The majority of the songs on offer at this site are poptastic hits, so if you must have the latest Toby Keith album, or the newest Gwen Stefani LP then do it here without being embarrased at how much you paid for it. That being said, they have a fair selection of albums from every genre.

But this is the question: Is this (russian) site bringing about a new pricing model that completely smashes most other models to pieces? Are songs just data that you pay for at micro payment prices? Could this happen anywhere else? Can you imagine buying movies at 10 cent a gigabyte? There are a growing number of sites with a .ru domain, that are selling mp3s at rediculously affordable prices. Just doing a search for mp3+ru brings up tons of places that are all written in Cyrillic and have reviews (also in non roman characters), charts, albums, singles and weekly updates.

The site that I found the easiest to navigate (and the one I originally tried) is here. The only major gripe I have with them is that there’s no easy way to download a whole album at a time. Just each song. But if each song is 7c a piece I guess I can live with it.