Chris Meller

Update: You can directly Digg this story here, or vote for it on Netscape here. The more people who read about this, the more I love you all…

After hearing the news via Digg today that All of MP3 will be closing sometime in the near future, I decided to stock up.

In the process of spending $20 tonight, I decided to check my history with All of MP3 to run some numbers…

Between my slow, slightly suspicious, start on March 7, 2005 and my last purchase prior to today on October 20, 2006, I spent a total of $180.93 to purchase a whopping 1,589 songs.

For those of you unable to operate a calculator, that comes out to 11.38 cents per song…

Assuming I’d have been willing to invest the same $180.93 over the past year in music purchased from the iTunes Music Store¹, that would mean I’d have netted 182 songs.

That means that, by using All of MP3.com, I was able to get 1,407 more songs for my money.

Now for the real comparison. I clicked through each pane of the painfully annoying iTunes Music Store purchase history for my account. In the same time period, I spent $1,067.59 at the iTMS on 1,078 songs².

To sum that all up:

All of MP3: 1,589 songs for $180.93
iTMS: 1,078 songs for $1,067.59

A tad different, no?

For reference, had I purchased those same 1,589 songs originally from All of MP3 at the iTunes Music Store instead, I’d have shelled out $1,573.11 for them³.

As one last note, I’d like to mention that my All of MP3 usage has not grown linearly. There has been an exponential curve to my purchasing over the past several (call it 6) months. Their introduction of the allTunes software package, combined with their ever increasing catalog and more rapid availability of new releases has greatly driven me towards them. These changes have really put it more on-par with the iTMS, in what I’d call real competition.

For a reference of the exponential growth, see this chart:

There’s a pretty obvious increase over the past 18 months…

Now, if only I had the patience to figure out some kind of predictive modeling application that would calculate how much I’d have actually spent and how many songs I’d have gotten, had I only had the iTMS as a resource… Still, even to a total laymen, I think it should be pretty obvious that, while I’m certainly willing to spend money on my music, I’m far more willing to buy much more (511 songs in this instance, and don’t forget the exponential growth curve) at a lower price.

Oh no, could the RIAA actually be wrong about how customers buy their music? Nahhh…

1. To be fair, I did purchase a number of CDs at the iTMS that weren’t yet available on All of MP3, so we’re not strictly talking apples-to-apples all around. Still, that’s $180 spent at All of MP3 that could have been spent anywhere else as well. ↩
2. Approximately. Since the purchase history doesn’t list the number of songs purchased, I assumed 99 cents each when calculating. Some rounding would also have occurred. Also note that there were 3 free songs listed on my account, which I did not take into account here. Still, the results wouldn’t have been significantly different, had we had exact figures to work with. ↩
3. Again, assuming an exact 99 cents per song. Once more, give or take a little for a full album isn’t going to make a significant impact on our figures. ↩