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Around 2012 I got some credits for Amazon Music (or whatever it was called at the time) so I bought and downloaded a couple of international albums. Then I noticed tracks in a single album could have three different bitrates. Not definitive proof that the files were ill-gotten but very fishy.

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From Wikipedia:

> All tracks were originally sold in 256 kilobits-per-second variable bitrate MP3 format without per-customer watermarking or DRM

Don‘t remember 100% but wouldn‘t the variable bit rate explain this?

Doubt it. It was something like 128k, 192k, 320k. Who the hell encodes the same album like that.

I purchased an mp3 from Amazon Music, and there was a song that had a glitch in it, like you used to get ripping CDs if there was a problem reading part of the disc. I torrented the same track and the same glitch was there. So either Amazon was using pirated copies or the glitch existed in the actual recording. I guess I'd need to find a physical copy of the recording to compare.

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