Posts Tagged ‘Allofmp3’

Cheap MP3s Continue To Flow Through Eastern Europe

Those of you who possess the capacity to remember things may recall the Russian site AllOfMP3, which sold MP3s for dirt-cheap prices to those people who weren’t wary of handing their Diners Club cards over to servers in the former Soviet Union. That site was shut down in the summer of 2007, but it would seem that a year later, a successor has popped up: Meet MP3Count.com, which is a project of the Ukranian company «Best Music» Ltd., and which claims to remunerate artists under a copyright statute that has a lot of letters in its name–even though it only costs users $2 or $3 to download an album. But is MP3Count.com really that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, even though it’s got the usual suspects slobbering over its low price points? MORE »

I think there was recently a Mary Worth storyline about who you should give your credit card numbers to online. Scary!

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U.S. To Russia: Kill AllOfMP3 Or You’re Out Of Our Club

The U.S. was not pleased by AllOfMP3’s transmission from the great beyond this week, and it’s informed Russia that should the cheapo-MP3 site return to the Internet, it’ll likely doom Russia’s chances of being admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2007 (and maybe ever). MORE »


In Blog Transmission From The Future, AllOfMP3 Vows It Will Return

Now that the Prince-for-pennies Russian download site AllOfMP3 has been cleared of wrongdoing by the Russian government, it’s apparently on its way back from the Internet dead, or at least that’s what a blog post on the site from Aug. 31–yes, that’s this coming Friday–says. MORE »

In the year 2000, AllOfMP3.Com relocates to the Antarctic coast to avoid prosecution. Of course, they manage to upset the neighboring Adélie Penguins, who are furious they do not offer Antarctic Krill for ridiculously low prices.

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The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is planning to appeal yesterday’s acquittal of Denis Kvasov, founder of cheap-ass music site AllOfMP3.com, who was cleared of copyright-infringement charges by a Russian court yesterday. MORE »


The former owner of AllOfMP3.com, where you used to be able to get entire albums for the price of a grande latte, was cleared of illegally selling copyrighted material on the site, and the ruling judges even tweaked the Moscow police for an “extremely careless attitude to collecting evidence.” MORE »

I'd hardly call this justice. Unless you count me, a very independent artist, one of those greedy corporations who only have their own monetary interests at heart.

Yeah, allofmp3 once sold my band's stuff, as well the stuff of a lot of indie artists who I counted as friends. They made their reputation selling indie stuff and probably could've skated by under the RIAA's radar if they'd continued to just sell our stuff, rather than grabbing major-label stuff. Of course, they sold our stuff without the courtesy of asking, they also sold it without actually paying us a share of the profits - because they knew they could get away with it. How many indie bands are going to have the resources to hire a lawyer familiar with russian law, who can deal with ROMS?

(Oh, and for a while they were also selling a CD of ours that was released free on the internet as mp3 files. Caveat emptor there, especially if you bought the "high-quality wav files...")

So while they were great at sticking it to the RIAA, of which I approve, they were also really quite good at sticking it to artists who were laboring out of their basements and garages. Of that, I do not approve.

What I would love to see is a cheap pay-to-download service that doesn't have to resort to legal grey areas to do it, and that doesn't screw over the artists themselves. The RIAA has made it impossible for the most part, and AllOfMp3 has damaged the credibility of anyone who wants to try something different. This is just lose-lose all around.

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Russia Continues Playing Whack-A-Mole With Shady MP3 Stores

First, AllOfMP3 died, only to have MP3Sparks take its place (and allow users to use their banked AllOfMP3 credits). Now, Computerworld Australia is reporting that MP3Sparks has also been killed, but that users can take any credit still in their account to still-active AllOfMP3 sister site Alltunes. MORE »