“‘6.8 cents a song doesn’t even cover the royalties that other services pay to record labels, which makes me highly suspicious of the legality of the content they are selling,’ Jarad Carleton, an IT industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan in Palo Alto, California, told TechNewsWorld. Tired of paying 99 cents a track for your music downloads? Try paying for them by the megabyte,” John P. Mello Jr. reports for TechNewsWorld.
“An online store based in Moscow is selling music downloads by popular artists like Norah Jones, Usher, Prince, Outkast and scores of others for 1 to 2 cents per megabyte of song.
What’s more, the downloads are free of restrictions, and you can choose their format: WMA, AAC, MP3 or even direct copies of CD tracks with so-called lossless codecs,” Mello Jr. reports. “Paying by the megabyte for music can result in huge savings for consumers, according to Charles Wright, a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.”
Mello Jr. reports, “In an article published in the newspaper, Wright disclosed that over a period of a few weeks, he purchased 4.74 GB of MP3 music — about 968 tracks — for US$48.65 from the Russian site, Allofmp3.com. A similar buying spree at Apple’s iTunes store — which isn’t available Down Under — would cost US$958, he wrote. Something that good must be illegal, right? Apparently not.”
“According to Museekster.com — a self-described legal music services portal — Allofmp3 has signed an agreement with an intellectual-property watchdog group, the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems (ROMS), which gives the Web site the right to sell music downloads,” Mello Jr. reports.
Full article here.
Sounds pretty fishy to me.
This is going to be interesting. I can’t see how even if this site is legal it is allowed to sell outside of Russia. I also doubt that they are paying the licensing fees to Microsoft and Dolby for using the file formats.
Thinking about it, I agree with molety5. This site is too fishy.
Reading the article though, has anyone noticed Wal-Mart? That’s going to finish Napster even if Apple don’t.
allofmp3.com will take Paypal so you don’t have to divulge your credit card information.
um…they have beatles albums. but they are for vip members only. whatever that means.
(sniff, sniff)
smells like rotten fish here. Sounds like the Solvites still have not caught on to capitalism… they could charge way more then that and still be way cheaper then everyone else. Thought, I guess getting .01 – .02 per MB for them is like a .10 – .20 in the U.S. right? I might be way wrong…. but their money is not the strongest in the business.
It’s a well designed site, complete with 30 second previews, and has all the early Beatles and Stones music, something about Russia not signing international copyright treaties until 1972. There are a few free downloads, but they’re really, really slow. (CSN’s Deja Vu album is free).
It’s legit, in Russia. They are not ripping people off. The problem lies in violating a law in your respective country.
It’s illegal to gamble in most areas of the US, but go past the 12 mile limit in either ocean and your in international waters.
The Russian site is definatly wrong, you know at that price the artists don’t get a dime.
Like Asia, it’s about impossible to enforce. The governments don’t care, life is cheaper than a few illegally burned cd’s in most of those countries.
yea, let’s all start shopping online in………Russia.
Think I can find an internet bride?
Slashdot are reporting that the new DRM in iTunes has been cracked. That took the crackers about 12 hours longer than I was expecting. Get ready to download iTunes 4.5.1 any time soon.
It may not be around long, but I’m cashing in while I can. I can tell you it does work. Takes a while to figure everything out, but it works and its as cheap as advertised.
No longer do we fear merciless Soviet communism. Now we dread extreme Russian libertarian capitalism. Ain’t this somethin’? Thinking about this make my head hurt.
I tried it too. 10 bucks with Paypal.
Downloaded Pink Floyd the wall, Dark Side of the Moon, The Beatles White Album, and some other Pop Music.
Well I owned 4 of the CD’s at one point in my life…most of them lost or broken in a series of moves…so I don’t feel too guilty.
One note…these guys have done a pretty decent job of the website interface. The d/l links are kind of annoying….but the quality is great, and I experienced very fast downloads.
Later…
http://www.itunesperipod.com/
An average of 21 songs dowloaded from iTunes per iPod. Well, I would have downloaded more, but Apple does not offer much of the music that I enjoy.
What’s your excuse?
dyanmicv:
I don’t think the DRM was cracked. They found workarounds for the authorization limit is what it sounds like. You still need to have 1) the file and 2) the corresponding authorization. There is no application that generates keys or decrypts the files. Thus, the DRM itself has not been cracked.
The site also has Madonna. She doesn’t want her music available for download…PERIOD!!!! As it’s been said before, something is fishy!
Get it while you can
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The labels may as well give up, something like this can jump from country to country and about impossible to block.
Wait long enough and the price will come down even further.
3� a MB! buy 10MB get a 1 GB FREE!!
What’s the RIAA going to do? Serve search warrants to every computer user?
One of these so called poor college students is going to show their true net worth and bunghole the RIAA for years in court.
Trying it with $10 through PayPal, looks very good.
this site is incredible! i signed up with my paypal and selected the $10 option which gives you one gigabyte of downloads. so far i’ve downloaded about 50 songs encoded as aac at 192kbps and still have over eight dollars left. i hate to say it but if this turns out to be ligit, i think everyone will have to go back to the drawing board including apple.
the site is well executed in terms of design. it’s a little quirky in some areas and you have to figure out a few things, but once you get pass that, it’s download heaven.
they’ve covered all the bases. there’s no question about format because you get to choose (mp3, aac, wma, ogg, lossless). the encoding is slow, but the download is fast. you can download up to five songs at a time.
it’s ironic that a russian site is the one offering the freedom of choice. no offense meant to our russian readers.
In the Russia copyright laws are not the same as we have
http://stellar-one.com/copyright_references/copyright_and_related_topics_glossary.htm
http://www.usembassy.it/file2003_11/alia/a3112505.htm
http://www.bisnis.doc.gov/bisnis/isa/9903ripr.htm
Literary and artistic work is protected.
Performing artist, producer and record company are not protected as in other countries.
So basically record companies can�t regulate the price and they don�t own the rights for music and only lyrics writer, composer and musical arrangement gets royalties (because they own the song.
From the site:
“Before you continue browsing the site (registration on this site), you are to read and agree with all the clauses of the following document. In case you disagree with any of the clauses, you have no right to continue browsing the site (registration on this site), and must immediately leave it.
You agree with the fact that you are not able to use and even to download audio and video materials from Allofmp3.com catalogue if it is in the conflict with legislation of your country. Allofmp3.com Administration is unable to control all Allofmp3.com users, therefore the users are responsible for usage of the materials represented on the Site.”
I think that this means only Russians (by this, a citizen of Russia) may use the site legitimately.
It is a cracking site though! Very well thought out… I love the way you can choose the download format/resolution and pay per megabyte… and use Paypal. The whole experience is strightforward and friendly. This would be the future of online music if the West could its act together – and charge abut 10 cents per megabyte!
“You agree with the fact that you are not able to use and even to download audio and video materials from Allofmp3.com catalogue if it is in the conflict with legislation of your country. Allofmp3.com Administration is unable to control all Allofmp3.com users, therefore the users are responsible for usage of the materials represented on the Site.”
If this is the case, then there really wouldn’t be any moral/ethical/legal difference between using this site in the US and using Kazaa. If you believe tha artists deserve to get paid for thier work, then you probably shouldn’t be using this site. If that’s what you believe, that is.
I say use it and let your conscience pay the price. You’re only stealing in a different format. This is obviously a copywright infringement where artists don’t get any royalties.
I doubt that there is something illegal or fishy about it in Russia. They probably have the same legal loophole like they had in Spain. In some countries you are able to legally download music from foreign countries, in some others you can’t. People in Australia for example can perfectly buy their music from this site, people from the US can’t.
Artists obviously get money for their music. ROMS has a license agreement with artists/labels to distribute their music in Russia. The license agreement is just highly in favor of ROMS, while in other countries the balance is pretty much shifted toward the artists/labels.
I would say, start your legal downloading, when the labels/artists re-negotiate the license agreement, the site will probably die.
it is the paid version of Kazaa.