What have we here?

A Russian website which offers music for as little as a nickel a song.

They sell music by the megabyte, not by per-song transactions or monthly subscriptions like American music sites.

Moscow-based, they charge a penny a megabyte, and you can choose your compression format and quality level.

Even CD-quality sound costs far less than the 88-99 cents currently charged per track by American sites.

The legal status of the Russian status appears murky at best.

A spokesman for allofmp3.com said the site pays fees to the Russian Organzation for Multimedia and Digital Systems, a trade group supposedly authorized to manage copyrights in Russia.

Adrian Strain, a spokesman for the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said he had "... heard of allofmp3.com but couldn't comment on it until next week."

This is no minor annoyance to the music industry: the Russians are awesomely skilled when it comes to computers, and this may just finish off the music business as we know it.

A note before you go there all excited, to buy songs for a nickel apiece with CD quality: the English-language version of the site is overwhelmed with traffic, and you can't get on.

Find someone who reads Russian, then start rockin'.