AllofMP3.com gets it

In case you haven't heard of AllOfMP3, here's the scoop. They're a web site, based in the Russian Federation, that allows you to buy digital music by the megabyte. You buy $10 or $25 blocks of credits, then choose the songs you like at your leisure. You can download them at whatever fidelity you like, all the way up to and including the raw uncompressed audio that was on the original CD in many cases. It's quasi-legal there (at least, they withstood a legal challenge on their home turf recently), but the odds of it being legal where you live are slim to none. This hasn't stopped them from being hotter than the guy what swiped the crown jewels in some circles, of course.

All this is old news. The new news is this - they've recently released a software client that runs on a large percentage of the smartphones in the world. So now you can download anything in their catalog to your phone through a nice little custom app, encoded appropriately for your phone and small enough to fit. Small == cheap in their model, so it's entirely likely that you can get your favorite song as a ringtone from them for far less than your mobile service provider is charging. ($2.99 for Snow's Informer? Come on, T-Mobile.) How long before the cell networks start blocking this? Start your stopwatches.