MusicMP3.ru is a Russian music mp3 website. Individual tracks sell for as little as $0.15, and there’s a special offer price when buying complete albums. I downloaded the complete Portishead album, Third, for an amazing $1.48. That’s less than 75p!
As well as more popular, commercial artists such as Radiohead, Coldplay and U2 there is a wide range of genres and lists of lesser known artists. MusicMP3.ru has six main genres, all broken into sub-categories. Electronic music is well catered for with 37 sub-categories, including: techno, drum & bass, jungle, synth pop, trip hop, and ambient; as well as goa, lo-fi, noise and space! To be honest, I’m not sure it is that helpful to have so many.
I personally found it difficult to know which genre some artists were placed in. Bjork, for instance, was difficult to find under ‘Trip hop’, while I was surprised to find The Kills under ‘Lo-fi’. But I think this is a generic problem with trying to categorise an artist style, not a problem with the website, itself. My suggestion is to search for a specific artist by letter, not genre.
All mp3 download sites cater for popular artists, so to test how good the MusicMP3 catalogue was I selected a few lesser known electronic artists at random. Susumu Yokota, Burnt Friedman, Sven Vath, Hallucinogen and Blue States were all included alongside the more popular Portishead, Prodigy, Roni Size and Aphex Twin.
MusicMP3 offers top 10 download charts for each section as well as music news though this is not really a main part of the site.
The website itself is easy to use. Once I had found an album I wanted to buy, it was a simple process to follow; though I would have preferred to be able to download a zip file of a complete album instead of having to download each track individually. This addition would make the download experience more user-friendly.
Before buying a track you can preview the beginning, middle and end of the song which allows you to explore unknown artists or listen to album tracks before purchasing. I wish I had taken the opportunity to preview the Portishead album before I bothered to download it!
It also offers album reviews but like the news section, this is not the best place to find reviews, especially if you are looking for less commercial artists. First and foremost this is a great source for a wide range of very cheap but legal to download, mp3’s.
As a primary source of legally downloading cheap mp3’s, MusicMP3 is a great website. MusicMP3 is able to sell mp3’s for such a cheap price, compared with websites based in the rest of Europe and America, through a Russian organisation called ROMS. It is totally legal and well worth a visit.
2 comments so far
1 mat // Jun 9, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I prefer to download legal mp3 and save money using one of the sites compared at Legal MP3 sites chart at Squidoo
2 adam // Oct 29, 2008 at 11:52 pm
actually the musicians/labels will never see a dime of this money.
russia doesn’t enforce copyright laws.
my friends have had multiple releases stolen and sold by these labels. I’m all for piracy, but paying for stolen goods is wack.