Audiobubble Music Store

I received an email from the Audiobubble team about their online music store.

Audiobubble isn’t your average online music store.

It began in early 2005, when two musicians, Shaun Russell and Tom Chambers, decided to create a music service that was fair to artists and fair to customers. Tired of puny 30 second previews, lack of customer trust and lack of freedom for the artist, they created the Audiobubble concept.

We don’t use DRM because we know it isn’t consumer friendly. Shame that Napster, iTunes and other online music giants can’t wake up to this fact. Audiobubble is about freedom. Join the revolution!

I signed up for an account and was listening to previews in no time under Ubuntu Linux. The only information asked for during signup was email, username and password.

Payment is handled through PayPal, so if you don’t have a PayPal account and refuse to sign up for one you’re out of luck.

Other online stores that sell music files without DRM: Magnatune, Bleep, Mindawn, Audio Lunchbox.

20 thoughts on “Audiobubble Music Store”

  2. Well, if they just would learn that TLDs may be 4 characters long. I can’t register with my .info address.

  6. That’s not how AllOfMP3 works. You get to choose your encoding bit rate. The album price you are quoting is for 128 kbps. The real price is US$0.02 / MiB.

  9. foryourears.com has a nice selection of electronic music without DRM.

  10. or grammy.ru for free
    http://www.grammy.ru/music/mcatalog.php?act=az&sstr=O

    lot of Russian, but A-Z letters at the top and small blue floppy disk to click for download are self explaining. the servers are slow (20KByte/connection) and number of simult connections from the same IP is limited by 2 or 3. but it is completely free. no registration, no e-mail, no password. collection is large. quality is 128Kbits, most files are MP3.

  11. Magnatune also has a wonderful service. Since I have a problem with describing them adiquitely, here is what they say on their front page:

    We’re a record label.
    But we’re not evil.

    We call it “try before you buy.” It’s the shareware model applied to music. Listen to over 500 complete MP3 albums by our musicians (not 30 second snippets). If you like what you hear, download an album for as little as $5 (you pick the price), or buy a real CD, or license our music for commercial use.

    There is no copy protection (DRM) on our music, ever. Artists keep half of every purchase. And unlike most record labels, they keep all the rights to their music.

  12. As a note, you don’t actually need to have a Paypal account to pay, you just need a credit card to pay through them. If you don’t trust Paypal with that information, THEN you’re out of luck.

  13. It is clear that DRM secured content is against the user because it restricts you using it wherever you want.

    All shops using/selling DRM-free stuff are 1000 times better than iTunes, Musicload, etc.

    (Just wanted to bring all our thoughts to one point and stick here – forever!)

  16. http://www.BeatPick.com is offering a fair trade model with a good service too.
    1. no DRM 2. listen to entire albums for free 3. good music. 4. download WAV, mp3, OGG 5. share music once you buy.

  18. I’ve got to say thanks for the list of sites, I’ll keep those in mind. I’ve also got to toss my thoughts in about allofmp3.com, which I’ve been using for about two years now. I’ll admit originally I was worried about handing my CC data over to a Russian company, but (besides the fact I used a one time CC number and they use a third-party to handle transactions) I’ve never had any issue with them. Their download speeds are a little slow (20-40KBps) and their official client is Windows only (web interface available but clunky), but their catalog is huge. Well worth checking out.

  19. Another DRM-free music store with a new approach to online music sales is the Potato System from the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany (the guys who first invented MP3 compression). I’m not sure how well it is represented internationally.
    It’s based on the concept that everyone who buys music may redistribute the music on their own webpage and thus participate in those revenues (like a snowball system, except that it’s potatoes this time ;)).

  20. Peer Impact also sells MP3s

    But they also sell DRMed Tunes as well as protected games and soon time bombed movies for rent .

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