If it sounds too good…
19 billion songs available for download?? That equates to every person on earth having on average recorded 3 songs. And they’re all available on this obscure music download service. Scam? You be the judge.
No per song fees and no monthly fees ever. Legal? Not likely. Music artists and record companies want to earn money, so it’s not very likely that they will be giving all their music away for free. Especially to a web site that you have never heard of before.
Where there is money to be made, there will always be scams, and the Internet and music download services in particular are no exception. It is sad to read in online forums how many people are so easily fooled by these scams. Our hope is that this page will educate you so that when you do spend money on music online, you will get value for your money.
Note that this page deals with scams which may not be the same as illegal music download sites.
Free Software
One of the more popular scams is to take free software and “sell” it to you for what appears to be a reasonable cost, e.g. $20-40. This creates an illusion of legitimacy; you “paid” for the music, therefore it must be legal. Claims by these sites to be “100% legal” enforces the illusion. But when you read the fine print you will discover that it’s only legal if you refrain from downloading any copyrighted songs. Which pretty much excludes 99.9% of the music you were interested in to begin with.
Malicious Software
A more devious scam is to install spyware or adware on your computer when you think you’re only installing some great music downloading software. When you try out any new music web site make sure you’re using a safe web browser and that you have up-to-date anti-virus software installed. And never download any software unless you are 100% sure of the origin of the software and what it’s going to do to your computer. When in doubt, don’t!
Specific Sites
This is by no means a comprehensive list. These sites just happened to come up within a few minutes of searching. On the first three pages on Google for the search term download music, 20 of 33 sponsored links were links to scams. That’s over 60%! What happened to do no evil? Some of these sites will hopefully be gone before you come across them; unfortunately other sites will probably have replaced them.
Please note that what follows is a compilation of information from credible sources. Please use the resources referenced on this page and form your own opinion.
mp3musiq.com
This site claims to give you unlimited music downloads, no per song fees and no monthly charges ever. Just enter your name and email address to receive Download instructions. After you enter your information, you find out that you have to become a member for $34.95 for unlimited access. Not surprisingly you will now start receiving many emails from mp3musiq.com.
McAfee SiteAdvisor has the following analysis of mp3musiq.com: “Feedback from credible users suggests this site may be ‘fake’ (pretending to be another legitimate site in order to collect consumer/financial information).”
The “membership fee” gives you access to a public P2P network using free software. To distance themselves from the characteristics of a P2P network they say: “The purchase of a membership, however, is not a license to upload or download copyrighted material. We urge you to respect copyright and share responsibly.” You can find more funny phrases like this on their legal page.
You will find many web sites highly recommending mp3musiq.com. A plausible reason for this is that these sites earn 50% commission for each sale that they refer to mp3musiq.com. In fact ClickBank lists mp3musiq.com in the music category as having most web sites who earn commission by referring paying customers.
Read full review.
unlimitedownloads.com
A clone of mp3musiq.com.
Read full review.
MyMusicInc.com
Here are some actual quotes from their Terms of Use. We rest our case.
- “The fee assessed by MyMusicInc.com entitles You to access the location, evaluation, and or recommendation of software products available from the web site and for the installation and technical support provided. All software recommendations refer to software that is available without charge to individuals at large for specific purposes.”
- “MyMusicInc is a direct marketer that delivers email messages to its subscribers. All information voluntarily provided to MyMusicInc by a registrant may be used to support our marketing partner’s data services business. These services include the provision of personally identifiable data to marketing companies, advertising agencies, data compilers, data companies, and, to the extent permitted by law, individual reference, email marketers and look-up service programs.”
McAfee SiteAdvisor has the following analysis of mp3musiq.com: “Our analysis indicates that this site may be trying to sell you something which is normally available elsewhere for free.”
This is another ClickBank favorite. #2 on their list in the music category and paying 75% in commission. Expect to find many “review” sites recommending mymusicinc.com.
For an ironic twist on the meaning of free try this: On the home page click on the member login link. On the next page type anything as your name and email. Open sesame! You’re now in the secret members area.
The Center for Democracy and Technology has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against mymusicinc.com.
Read full review.
mp3-freedom.com and my-music-now.com
The MyMusicInc.com site hosted at a different URLs. The page headers and logo say My Music Inc. The same warnings apply.
Read full reviews: mp3-freedom.com, my-music-now.com.
iMusicSearch
A variation of mymusicinc.com. The members area is the same: musicinc.cc
Read full review.
K-Lite
Pay $39.95 for the K-Lite software which is essentially a separate loader for the Kazaa Media Desktop software. The end result is that you get access to the Kazaa P2P file sharing network. (See below.)
Here’s a new twist on a satisfaction guarantee: “If you don’t find the music you are looking for, cancel your membership and keep the software FREE!” Notice how it does not say that you will get any money back…
Rounds out the top 3 ClickBank sites.
Kazaa
One of the original P2P file sharing networks created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis of Skype fame.
The official Kazaa client can be downloaded free of charge and is financed by attached adware and Spyware (despite the “No Spyware” message displayed on Kazaa’s website). Read StopBadware.org’s report on Kazaa.
Over the past years, Kazaa’s parent was the target of many copyright-related lawsuits. On 27 July 2006, it was announced that Kazaa’s owner Sharman Networks had settled a lawsuit with the recording industry. The company agreed to pay $100 million in damages to the four major music companies- Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music. Kazaa will also commit to becoming a legal music download service.
allofmp3.com
This is a controversial site that operates out of Russia and sells songs per megabyte. allofmp3.com claim that they are legal and they have a valid license to operate from a Russian organization called ROMS. The International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers (IFPI) claim otherwise. Read more on Wikipedia.
Legal and moral issues aside, would you send your credit card information to a company in Russia that seems to operate using an international legal loophole?
Euclid Networks
This company operates many sites in this category using a few templates and many domains to lure in unsuspecting surfers:
AccessMp3Music, live-wire2006.com, iMusicNow.com, Mp3JustFree.com, FreeAccessMp3.com, MusicJustFree.com, mp3-all-free.com, movies-all-free.com, music-downloads-now.net, iMusicAccess.com, FreeMusicDownload.com, dcPlusPlus.com, Shareza.com, Bittorrent2.com, Limeshare.com
Why are there so many music scam sites?
The answer is simple: money. And lots of it! What follows is a hypothetical calculation of how much money these sites are making. We have no insight into the financials of these sites, but using publicly available information we pose the following:
- In May 2006 Yahoo reported 4,240,315 searches for “music download”.
- The top bidder for that search term was $0.92.
- Google uses the click through rate (CTR) in addition to the bid to determine in which order ads are shown. To be listed in the top three results above the natural search results you probably have to have a CTR over 5%. Several of these sites make this top-3 list. The click through rate on Yahoo ads is probably similar.
- Some of the affiliate programs for these sites boast a 1-in-20 conversion, i.e. one out of every twenty visitors actually sign up. There is no way to validate this claim, but based on the $0.92 ad bid it’s probably in the right order of magnitude.
- The average price level for these scams seems to be around $35.
If we multiply all these numbers we find that our hypothetical site generates 10,601 sales totaling $371,028. To get this traffic they shell out $195,054 in advertisement fees. This leaves the tidy sum of $175,973 in profit. Per month! It bears repeating: We have no inside information and some of the numbers above are educated guesses. But even if we’re way off, it’s pretty clear that this is a very big business.
How to protect yourself
For every site that we claim to be a scam, there are hundreds of other review sites out there that claim it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Don’t trust them, and don’t trust us. Do your own research before you part with your money and jeopardize your computer.
Type in the name of the site on Google and see what comes up. For both legal and scam sites there will be several links and ads promoting them. Ignore those. What you should be looking for is any links that describe the site as a scam or from people getting ripped off. If nothing comes up try combining the site name with words like scam, fraud, refund. If still nothing comes up, that’s a good sign.
McAfee SiteAdvisor
SiteAdvisor is a great free service. Type in the URL of a site and they will give you their researched opinion of the site. Obviously they can’t cover all sites, but if it’s in their database and it’s a red flag, don’t proceed any further.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is another great free resource. They have over a million articles in English on almost every conceivable topic. If you want to learn more about adware, spyware or P2P this is the place.
When you sign up for a new service, any service, don’t give them your personal email address. Create a new one like bigmusicfan@hotmail.com or nospamthanks@yahoo.com and use that.
Anti-Virus
The two most well-known programs are:
Anti-Spyware
There are many free programs and web sites out there that offer to scan you computer for spyware. Unfortunately many of them are spyware themselves that install nasty stuff while they’re scanning.
Our favorite anti-spyware program is Ad-Aware. How do you know that you can trust it? It was picked by Google to be part of their Google Pack.
Legitimate Music Services
This web site is dedicated to reviewing online music services. First go to our overview page, compare and read reviews. When you’re ready to get in the water check if there is a free trial available or a special offer or coupon you can use.
All major legitimate music subscription services offer free trials: