Site terms

Type in a song, an album or an artist and MP3Download asks an external music catalogue — a library we have no hand in running — what it holds. Back come artist pages, album running orders and individual songs, each one paired with the thirty-second sample the catalogue publishes, so you can listen before you commit and be sure you have the right recording. Where a track can be downloaded, you can save it to your device.

It is worth being precise about what that means, because it is unusual. No audio is stored on this server. A download is put together inside the browser while you watch it happen: the audio arrives through our proxy, a background worker on the page unscrambles it, and the title, artist and cover art are written into the file on your machine before you save it. We never end up holding a copy of the finished file.

There is also nothing to sign up for. The site has no registration of any kind, asks for no payment, and gives you no way to put files of your own onto it.

The titles, the artwork, the album running orders, the samples — all of it reaches you from that outside service. MP3Download has no say in what the catalogue holds, and the recordings themselves belong to the artists, labels and rights holders behind them. We claim none of it.

Two practical things follow from that. The first is that what you can find depends on where you are sitting — music licensing is sold country by country, so a release that shows up for one visitor may be missing entirely for another. The second is that it moves. Albums get withdrawn, reissued under a different catalogue number, or quietly replaced by a remaster. Something that worked last month can stop working, and that is almost always a change at the source rather than a fault on this end.

Audio quality works the same way. You choose between MP3 at 128 kbps, MP3 at 320 kbps and lossless FLAC before a download begins, and the file you receive is the format you asked for — never a smaller one substituted quietly in its place. What is on offer is decided per track by the source catalogue, so a particular release may not carry every format; when that happens the option comes back marked unavailable and you can choose another.

Saving a file is the easy part. Working out whether you are entitled to is the part only you can do, because the answer turns on where you live and what you mean to do with it afterwards.

Copyright rules differ a great deal between countries. A private copy that is entirely unremarkable in one place is an infringement in another, and the source service's own terms may rule it out either way. By downloading from MP3Download you are telling us that you are allowed to do so where you are, and that you will keep the file to the uses that permission covers. We cannot grant you rights we do not hold, and nothing on this page should be read as us handing you any.

Passing files on is where most people come unstuck. Putting a download on another website, selling it, folding it into something you publish, or using it behind a video or in commercial work needs a licence from the rights holder. That is a conversation to have with them, not with us.

One account at the source serves everybody who visits, and there is a ceiling on how hard it can be leaned on before the whole thing falls over, which means a few inconsiderate visitors really can spoil it for everybody else. So, concretely, please steer clear of:

• Pointing crawlers, scripts or scraping tools at the search endpoints, or assembling your own copy of what the search returns.
• Queueing bulk or batch downloads — a whole discography at a time, or every entry in a chart.
• Working around the per-address request limits by rotating IPs, proxies or browser sessions.
• Defeating the verification challenge that sometimes appears before a download, or reusing its token outside the browser session it was issued to.
• Reselling, rebranding or wrapping access to this site inside a product of your own.
• Probing the site for weaknesses, or interfering with anybody else getting on with their day here.

Each address gets an allowance of requests per minute. Go past it and the extra requests are simply turned away until the next minute comes round — waiting a moment is the whole fix. Traffic that keeps pushing far beyond what a person listening to music would ever generate can have its access withdrawn, and there is nobody staffing an appeals desk if it is.

Spotted a genuine security flaw rather than a way to grab more files? That is the opposite of a nuisance and we would be glad to hear from you. The contact page is the place for it.

Candidly: not a great deal, and it seems better to say so here than to bury it in a clause near the bottom.

MP3Download is offered exactly as it stands, with no warranty of any kind. We do not promise that it will be reachable, that it will behave without errors, that a search result is correct or complete, that a download will run to the end, or that any of it fits some purpose you have in mind. There is no uptime figure to hold us to and no support agreement behind it. When the source changes something, parts of the site can break without warning and may stay broken until somebody has time to look.

Which is a long way of asking you not to build anything that matters on top of this, and to keep your own copies of files you would be sorry to lose. As far as the law where you are permits, MP3Download is not answerable for loss, damage, cost or missing data arising out of your use of the site, out of anything you obtained through it, or out of it being unavailable at the moment you wanted it. Some countries do not allow that exclusion to be absolute; where yours does not, it applies as far as it lawfully can and no further.

MP3Download is somebody's personal side project rather than a company, and it has no tie whatsoever to any music catalogue or streaming platform — no partnership, no endorsement, no arrangement of any sort. Features get added, reworked or dropped as the project goes along, and the whole thing may be paused or closed down at any point, without notice and without any obligation to explain.

If that day comes there will be no export, no archive and no migration anywhere else — which is one more reason to keep local copies of anything you want to hang on to.

This page gets rewritten whenever the site itself moves on. Nothing announces that it has happened, so whatever is in front of you on the day you visit is the version that stands — if any of it matters to you, it is worth a glance now and then.

Using MP3Download is how you signal that you are content with the wording as it reads today. Come across something here you cannot live with, and the remedy is refreshingly simple: close the tab and leave the site alone.