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Lavamus is an online music service that has several associated websites, or "network" sites, that all utilize Lavamus resources in order to operate. Some other well known websites that are part of the Lavamus network are JustMusicStore and iSOUND.be. One good feature of using sites on the Lavamus network is that you can use the same account and balance to download from all of these sites - meaning if the site you signed up on goes down or has some kind of problem, you can simply switch to a different site using your same login information. But what are the differences between these sites, and are there even more of them out there?

First of all, many people have used Lavamus for their music needs in the past very successfully. On the other hand, earlier this year there were some downtime problems (possibly related to moving hosts) that worried lots of people. Since then, however, Lavamus has been operating like normal.

Here are the known sites that are part of the Lavamus network that are currently functioning:

Lavamus.com
JustMusicStore.com
iSOUND.be
LigaMusic.com
AllOffMP3.org
MP3ShopCart.com
BoxMP3.net
JeyMP3.com
MP3Legal.org
ShoutMP3.com
Tunes4U.org
YourMP3Top.com
MP3-Store.org

If you click through all of these sites, the first thing you'll notice is that most of them look similar to Lavamus.com with perhaps some minor changes (a different logo, or small changes on different parts of the site). The only sites that really stand out as being different looking are JustMusicStore.com and JeyMP3.com. But a closer look shows some more subtle differences between the sites as well, most notably in the number of Albums, Artists, and Releases each site reports to have.

While it is safe to assume that each of the sites shares the main catalog of the Lavamus network, it has been shown in the past that it must also be possible to have an individual catalog as well, as was the case with JustMusicStore.com (that may have changed as of late, however - it appears that they share the same catalog as the rest of the network now). The table below illustrates the reported amount of media on each site:

So what's the story here? It looks like none of the other websites show the same number of Artists/Albums/Tracks as the main Lavamus.com website. It could simply be that they have not updated their stats, but what about the ones that report much larger numbers? Well, its something to wonder about. Perhaps someone from the Lavamus network would let us know why that is. It is interesting that some of the numbers appeared to have simply been changed by an obvious factor (from 159890 to 259890, for example).

So, in conclusion, the idea of having multiple alternative download sites available to me under the same account is an attractive one - when my usual site goes down, its nice to know I will have an alternative (that is, as long as the main Lavamus servers are not down). But as for me, I think I'd stick with the main Lavamus.com website - there don't seem to be any obvious advantages of signing up on any of the other ones.

Please feel free to leave comments below.