I read about AllofMP3 in a Wall Street Journal article and almost immediately set up an account and started buying albums. At that point songs cost maybe 10 cents and albums went for about a dollar. They doubled the price on me and I wasn’t happy but it was still a lot better than itunes. I got used to fixing the tags, to backwards apostrophes, and to slow downloads that you had to do a track at a time if you were on a mac. I followed with interest their rise to the highest-volume online music site in Europe and their repeated run-ins with the big record companies .
Here is a "tech support" message I got from them on 2/3/07:
Administrator message:
Dear XXXXXXXX,
As a longtime devoted user of allofmp3.com you have been selected for a membership in the private music club which we launched. It will be called Memphis Members club.
We noticed that you spend significant amounts on music and we wanted to thank you for that. Only a small fraction of users were given this membership and you are among them.
The members will be entitled to some aditional services and benefits from allofmp3.
Among the things club members will enjoy will be:
– priority highly responsive user support;
– balance credit limit;
– further flexibility of the payment methods;
– music requests from the members.New distinctions will be available for the Memphis Members in the future. The membership is not transferrabe, and we ask you not to disclose site access information to anyone. We do not accept requests from other users to join the club.
Your personal login page to this club is
http://XXXXXXXX.memphismembers.com/
which we suggest you to bookmark. You will have to use your allofmp3.com username and password. Your balance and a $15 introductory bonus will be accessible from this new site.
Sincerely,
Allofmp3.com
I guess that my music log actually got read because "memphismembers" became a key search item in google analytics and Will says that there were threads in other forums wondering why I got moved there when people who spent more money than me didn’t. I’ll keep buying tracks from them as long as they are in business.