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February 24, 2006
RIAA sets the bullies on allofmp3.com
You may recall that way back in May 2004, Bleeding Edge started an international run on the Russian-based cheap music store allofmp3.com which brought the entire site down for several days, with one of our stories which pointed out that it represented an apparently legal version of Heaven for the music lover.
"Over the past few weeks," we wrote, "purely as a research project of course, we have downloaded from the internet 4.74 GB of MP3 music, which amounts to 968 tracks or 56 albums - from a collection of artists that ranges from Norah Jones through the Beatles, Janis Ian, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell to Miles Davis and Charles Mingus.
"Had we been able to use the iTunes Music Store - still not available in Australia - those downloads would have cost us US99 cents apiece, which works out to $US958, or about $A1300 in real money. On the Telstra music store, we would have been up for $1442, provided we were BigPond customers. Since we're not, our credit card would have had a $1829.52 work-out. "
Now that we do have a local iTMS, we know they would have cost even more.
But, as we wrote back then, "We weren't about to spend anything like that, but we also weren't prepared to do anything conspicuously illegal. We bought all those songs for $US48.65, or $66 in local currency, which works out, according to our arithmetic, to 6.8 cents a track.
"That's the apparently insane price proposition that a Russian site called allofmp3.com offers its customers. You buy your music by the megabyte, at the rate of 500 MB for $US5 and you dial in the sort of encoding you want: MP3, MPEG4-AAC, OGG, MPC, WMA etc at various bit rates using different encoders _ say the LAME alt-presets. If we were prepared to pay more for the bandwidth, we could elect to have the music encoded with lossless algorithms, giving us the same quality as the original CD.
We also reported on an unsuccesful bid by the recording industry to close allofmp3 down.
True to its usual tactics, the Rapacious Industry Association of America now seems to have arranged for the US Government to do its dirty work for it. What's interesting is that we haven't been able to access the RIAA site since the news broke. We wonder if there's been a hacker backlash?
Posted by cw at February 24, 2006 07:25 PM
Comments
I guess P.R. isn't high on the list of responsibilites for the Recording Industry Ass. of America. All you hear from them is whining that their customers are thieves, and launching lawsuits. I hope AllOfMp3.com remains a thorn in their side for some time.
Posted by: Colin J at February 25, 2006 08:37 AM
Any excuse it seems to create a proxy for the old US versus Russia thing. RIAA doesn't get it. People will quite happily pay a REASONABLE price for downloads. But if you jack up the price to stratospheric levels, whaddya think's going to happen? People will go elsewhere. I had an occasion where somebody from APRA (Australia Performing Rights Asoociation - I think) came in to my store and tried to tell me that I owed them a licence fee for playing a radio. I told them to go away (well, I used another adjective starting with "f" that I won't use here).
My objection was stated thus:
1) the radio was tuned to a publicly broadcasted, and therefore in the public domain, radio channel;
2) that channel had paid a licence fee to operate, as set by the Government, and this fee has its basis in law to do 1) above;
3) or, the channel was a public broadcaster, ABC, JJJ, SBS radio that is exempted BY LEGISLATION from paying said fee;
4) those stations, whether 2) or 3) above, pay royalties to the record company for the use of the record during broadcasting;
5) It is not my responsibility to direct whether or not those same record companies pay said royalties to their artists;
and finally:
6) can you prove directly whether or not any monies paid to you go to the artists as claimed or do you use it to run your organization, which might not have a mandate to operate on the artists' behalf (after all - isn't that what a record company is supposed to do?)
After successfully baffling the guy with b/s, he slunk off, never to darken my doorway again. My point is, these self appointed arbiters of who should pay what for music are unrepresentative of who they claim to act for and are in it simply to pad their chequebooks, uning a quasi-legal interpretation to do so.
Posted by: Ryan at February 25, 2006 12:13 PM