“Britons were warned Tuesday by the British trade association BPI that use of AllofMP3.com was illegal, although it did not plan to pursue users of the service when it files suit against the Russian company in British court. The industry claims that the site is not authorized to sell digital music. ‘AllofMP3.com is illegal under UK law and it is illegal to download from it,” BPI General Counsel Roz Groome said. “We are going to sue AllofMP3.com in the UK courts – we are going to seek a judgment not against the users of the site, but against the site itself,'” Ed Oswald reports for BetaNews.
“AllofMP3 has become the second most popular download site in the country behind iTunes with a 14 percent share of the market. Individual tracks on the site sell for as little as four pence (7 cents US), with entire albums retailing for as low as one pound ($1.88 USD),” Oswald reports. “AllofMP3 claims licenses from Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS) and the Rightholders Federation for Collective Copyright Management of Works Used Interactively (FAIR). However, the industry has called the ROMS license invalid and said that is would not cover users in foreign countries.”
Full article here.
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AllofMP3 jeopardizes Russia’s WTO bid – June 05, 2006
The thing for me about allofmp3 is that if we assume for a second that it is legal then why is it so cheap? Surely as a business they want to make money, if they’re paying the artists, paying for bandwidth and so on then their margins can’t be that huge. Why not add a few cents to each song? They’re already massively undercutting everyone else anyway so they’re hardly gonna lose customers because they’re all of a sudden really expensive. It seems to me that they so cheap because they have to make themselves so attractive that people can put aside the dubious legality of it all.
Ultimately, forgetting iTunes and just looking at music as a whole. An artist sells their songs to a record company in exchange for the record company marketing them, and paying for all associated costs – they then get an agreed cut. If they don’t like the cut then get a contract with another record company or do it yourself. Of course if there was only 1 record company they would have a monopoly and you could then argue that artists would be abused and held to ransom but there isn’t only 1 (at least not yet).
What’s “legal” in one juridiction may be “illegal” in another — it’s so relative and definitely not associated with “right and wrong”.
Typically, laws are enacted to protect the vested interests of those who have power (money) — although lawmakers like to tell the masses that the laws are being passed for their “safety and protection” — and the masses keep falling for it.
Why I like AllOfMP3.com
(Do I use it, not for two years now. Is it illegal, yes.)
It is simple.
You can choose your encoding and the bitrate.
Thank you for giving me choice. Sometimes I want a very high bitrate. Other times a medium bitrate. Depends how much I like the song/album.
Sometimes I want lossless .acc, other times I want generic .mp3.
Choice, choice, choice. That is why I like AllOfMP3.
Too bad it is illegal. Otherwise I would still be using it. I wish I didn’t have to stop using it about two years ago.
AllofMp3.com is legal, in Russia.
Users in other countries break their own laws if they download from the site.
If you want it even free-er than AllofMp3.com, then check out PirateBay.com and the Mac version of Azureus, make sure you use somebody else’s WiFi though.
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I personally buy all my music legally, with over 2700 songs bought from iTMS alone and the rest from cds.
According to polls, I seem to be the exception with most users only have downloaded 100-200 songs from iTMS.
Yeah, if iTunes supposedly isn’t making money at 99¢ per song, how are these guys making money at 7¢ per song? And how can the artists be getting any reasonable royalties at these rates (if the proportions are the same, it would be a tiny fraction of a cent per song sold).
Obviously. no matter what they say, allofmp3 will not be handing over money to the artists. At those prices, there’s no way they could be. We could all make a pretty penny if we were allowed to just rip off tracks and then only have to cover server and bandwith costs and that’s just what they will be doing.
As for artists deciding that they don’t like their cut and simply transferring to another record company, then George Michael and Michael Jackson will tell you just how difficult that will be.
“Why not add a few cents to each song?”
LOL. Only a Mac user would advocate increasing the price of something. It’s in his blood I guess
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Bonkers for Mac: If you want to boil it down to a “right or wrong” issue, it can be done. Do artists have the right to control distribution of their work and profit from it? Do they have a right to control the terms of the distribution and profit? Is it right for everyone to be able to ignore or circumvent those rights?
Undoubtedly many artists to do not have the control or profit they would like, but that is their own fault for caving in to big corporations and signing their rights away. But that is a problem of personal choice and implementation, and does not deal with the merits of copyright law.
Clearly AllofMP3.com is a band of pirates making money at the expense of music artists, and giving their clientele a band-aid for their conscience in the form of greatly stretched claims of legality.
The British are American pawns
Actually, the Queen of England owns America and we are their puppets.
Problem is, artists are not usually businesspeople… so they are easily railroaded by the music business. They’re an easy target. A group of people are more passionate about the work or about beaing famous, than about the money. Therefore, the labels make a tonne off the artists.
The music industry is really all about exploitation.
p2p has turned the labels into victims.
Actually, if the Queen of England owned America and we were her puppets, she would have already taken Puppet Bush out back and whipped his behind for being a goddam liar. The Queen WILL NOT put up with liars.
Unfortunately, America does.
MW: today, as in, “Today, the senate rejected a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, showing Bushie and the Repuglicans that they CANNOT avert our eyes away from their horrible leadership by concocting a false “problem” in America that needs to be dealt with. Deal with the war, gas prices, and your HISTORICALLY AWFUL approval ratings… NOT the fags.”
The ability to chose the bitrate makes it all worth it for me
Jackson: Everything you said is true, but still it is better for artists to earn some money (by people buying through legal channels) than for them to earn none at all (AllofMP3.com and Co.).
An even better approach is for artists to ban together and release their music through no-middleman (or less middlemen) channels, such as through various independent artist websites that have sprung up. They get a bigger slice of the pie, we get cheaper music. There is also a good opportunity for some marketing-savvy agency to jump in and help promote artists for less money than the big labels are charging (but still at a decent profit). Seems like a vacuum waiting to be filled.
Why I like ripping CDs.
It is simple.
You can choose your encoding and the bitrate.
Choice, choice, choice.
It’s cheap ($6-8 per CD from BMG Music Club).
Sound quality is better than any compressed format.
Too bad some CDs have DRM and rootkits.
I will use allofmp3 exclusively until the day it folds (which I do not see happening – the Russian mob won’t let it).
Long live ALLOFMP3 – screw iTunes.
Ultimately this AllOfMe lawsuit could be good as it could bring down some of these stupid national borders that prevent iTunes from having the same music collection in the USA, as in Japan, as in France, and finally let iTunes stores open in all the currently unserved countries.
“Ultimately this AllOfMe lawsuit could be good as it could bring down some of these stupid national borders that prevent iTunes from having the same music collection in the USA, as in Japan, as in France, and finally let iTunes stores open in all the currently unserved countries.”
groan…and how do you arrive at that fantasy?
Individual tracks on the site sell for as little as four pence (7 cents US), with entire albums retailing for as low as one pound ($1.88 USD),”
Which is not *cheap*, it is exactly the price song and album downloads SHOULD have, were it not for the greedy record companies and RIAA. It’s only becuase we are used to the inflated prices set by those sharks that we consider this cheap.
No mechanical costs, minimum distribution costs (almost zero if something like bit torrent is used), only recording costs and the royalties to artists should be covered. With prices such as that of allofmp3, all these are covered. Yet, the price for downloading music is the same artificially high price as that of retail CDs. It’s a shame.
Let’s suppose an artist sells 1.000.000 downloads of its album at $1.88.
We can split the money thusly:
a) costs for running the service etc, 10% = $180.000 (more than covered)
b) artist cut, 20% = $380.000 (not bad!)
We also have the rest 70% which totals $1.300.000
We can increase the artists share,pay for recording, marketing, etc.
Why should a company earn 5 times this money? Just because it can?
Free market can only when when you have competing sources for buying an item. Since a single company owns and controls the rights to buy a specific artist, there is NO competition.
(It’s not the same with, say, cars, because even if a specific model is only sold by a specific manufacturer, any other more will more or less do the same thing. Music content though is not equivalent, meaning you cant just buy Michael Jackson Cd when you want Madonna).
KaramaData says:
“If you want it even free-er than AllofMp3.com, then check out PirateBay.com and the Mac version of Azureus”
Piratebay.org got busted last week.