yeah the whole allofmp3 thing is kind of wacky... the credit card companies are essentially caving from pressure from RIAA and such like. It puts the card companies in a weird position as they are acting as de facto law enforcement. I too am waiting to see if allofmp3 gets it sorted, as I absolutely refuse to buy music with DRM or potential DRM issues. emusic.com use to, and still might be, DRM free. I've never been happy with their methods of pricing, but that might have changed. They certainly don't have as good selection as the Russian site.

do what i do..only listen to midis. They leave much more to the imagination and I always feel like I'm riding an elevator

If it's a matter of leaving more to the imagination, maybe I'll just stick to the soundtrack constantly running through my head.

Apparantly I've been downloading "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" for about four days now.

Personally I have no problem with Itunes. But I also have an Ipod so that makes my preference a little more understandable. I think their selection is pretty good and I don't think 99 cents per song is that high. Plus they will just charge you for one song at a time if you so desire. How much did songs cost on the Russian Mob site?

I can't speak for Barrett, but it is precisely because itunes contains DRM that I won't use it. I think there are ways to strip it out, via 3rd party apps, but I hate the idea that the company selling you the music also gets to dictate how often you can copy it to your mp3 player, or to mix cds or...? .99 a song is not too bad a price to pay (although I don't know why you have to pay the equilvlent of a CD for non CD format, no packaging...), the Russian Mob site charged by the bandwidth, so if you wanted music at 96K you could get a few albums for about $2. 192K = about $2-3 an album. PLUS, and this was slick I thought, you could download as wma, mp3, ogg, lossless... whatever YOU needed. Not, what others thought you needed.

I have an iPod, too. But so many times, I download a song on my desktop but can't listen to it on my laptop. Or I can't put a song on a mix CD. Or whatever. It really sucks that I've paid legitimately for a song, but I can only listen to it on certain devices. I get pissed, and that makes me want to just steal music, because it feels like the only alternative.

I don't mind paying. But like Edgewood says, I want to use music the way I need to, not the way others *think* I need to.

That's my complaint about the ipod/itunes thing ... thats why this is my new project
Building My OWn MP3 Player

I can certainly see why people may have a problem with the whole DRM thing. I would certainly be happier if we had one universal format that worked on all download sites and all MP3 players. But I've had Itunes and an Ipod since 2003 and have yet to exhaust the burning of any one song. And believe me I have Sexyback on so may different mix CDs it's not even funny!