Anyone interested in music, and the debate about digital rights, should definitely look at this site: www.allofmp3.com. As Philip Miseldine comments:
This is stunning, and I'm probably late coming to it. AllofMP3.com is the best online music shop ever. It kicks iTunes to the kerb.For starts, just check out the selection (Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones for example) ... and get this, you choose your encoding type and bit rate. Most albums are available in OGG, WMA, MP3, and MPEG-4 up to bitrates of 256kbps or even, on some more select items, lossless encoding.
A whole album costs around $0.30 in high quality 192kpbs WMA.
Oh! And you can download full music videos too, in SVCD format.
Is the site legal? According to The New Statesman, in a post by Tom Armitage on their New Media Awards site, dated 24 February, 2004:
allofMP3.com is an (sic) legal online music retailer much like any other, but with one crucial difference: the price. At Apple’s iTunes Music Store, 99 cents buys you a single track; at allofMP3.com, $14.95 gets you 1000 tracks per month. It sounds too good to be true. The site manages to offer such ridiculously low prices because of the peculiarities in Russian copyright law. All the music on the site is licensed by ROMS, the Russian Organisation for Multimedia and Digital Systems, and the assistant to the lawyer of ROMS assured music portal Museekster.com that: “the sites you mentioned conduct their business legally and are licensed by ROMS, in full accordance with Russian and international law“.allofMP3.com is not only unusual with regards to its pricing model; it also features some noteworthy technology. The files it provides have no digital rights management information attached to them. This means that there are no restrictions on how many times you copy or distribute the files once they’ve been downloaded. The files can be copied between an unlimited number of computers and electronic devices. It is still illegal to give the files to people who have not paid for them, but allofMP3.com clearly feel they can trust their customers to keep the law, rather than potentially crippling the files they have paid for.
... The site demonstrates a clear understanding of the internet and how best to exploit it, applying local copyright law to a global marketplace. Whether the record industry will be as impressed with it as the public remains to be seen.
The site raises a number of very interesting questions, not least how performers and writers get paid. You may feel the the very existence of such sites undermines the livelihood of musicians and song-writers; on the other hand, you may think that culture and commerce are changing, and authors and musicians are going to be paid in a different way from now on — surviving, perhaps, without the assistance of large, international companies. (In January, Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel launched MUDDA, ‘a provocative new musicians’ alliance that would cut against the industry grain by letting artists sell their music online instead of only through record labels‘. See further here.)
What is unusual about allofMP3.com is that they have taken the basic performing rights business model that ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast Music Inc) have used uncontroversially for 60 years and applied the “broadcast” concept to downloaded recordings. This, of course, would never fly in the US and ASCAP and BMI wouldn’t think of it. OTOH, I suspect that in Russia, the performing arts society has much more legal and political clout than do the local divisions/licensees of Universal, EMI, BMG, etc. They have seen a business opportunity for their members and apparently have the power to overrule the objections of the record companies. ... allofMP3.com operates on a broadcast model not a CD sales model.
Coincidentally, today Professor Lawrence Lessig publishes his book, Free Culture, on the web — where it is available for free. His publisher of the hard copy, Penguin, supports this move. Read more about it here.
Footnote: Wal-Mart has also entered the on-line music market, but The Register is sceptical.
