Russian Music Site Offering Legal Songs By The MB

An anonymous reader writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on a Russian Music site that is offering legal digital music by the MB. The site apparently has a license from the Russian Music authorities to legally distribute songs for a fraction of the price of what is being offered by iTunes and others. The report from SMH is here. Amazingly, the site offers files in any format and encoding you choose and rips it on the fly. Notifications by email follow when the songs are ready for download. Sounds a little to good to be true :)"

Comments

Re:Debsux

[parksie]

Microsoft already did that when they turned Windows XP into a Fisher-Price exec's bad dream.

Re:Not legal

[dasmegabyte]

Its high time The People got to enjoy the benefits of our technological advances

Benefits such as hassle free theft of whatever music you want for a penny a megabyte?

Get your communism out of my CD player, man. I prefer my musicians not to die of poverty in the gutter -- unless they're punk, of course.

Colo in Russia then

[FreeUser]

When you download from this site, there is a master copy in Russia. At the end of the process, there is a master copy in Russia AND a copy on your hard drive. That's two copies, and that already indicates that it's not an import. And the copyright holder has the exclusive right to reproduce his work in the US per 106.

If it is illegal for Americans to legally purchase music in another jurisdiction and move it directly to their computer in the technological backwater that is quickly becoming the United States, then perhaps one might colo a computer with some storage in Russia, download the legally purchased music there, and then move the files personally from the computer in russia to the computer in the soon-to-be-impoverished-through-asinine-IP-laws United States.

The purchase and download all happen in Russia. The importation from one's personal PC in Russia to one's personal PC in the United States is, well, personal, and shouldn't run afoul of any laws.

And if it does ... well, that is just one more in an ever growing (and already very long) list of reasons to emigrate to a more sensible jurisdiction (read: just about anywhere else in the developed world, and plenty of places in the developing world)

Re:One of these days, Alice

[squiggleslash]

I don't know if you're being sarcastic...

Please tell me you're kidding!

Many of the musical "ARTISTS" today are nothing but cynical business drones after a buck. How many rap songs (I use the word song loosly) are nothing but remixes of other peoples music. Oh yeah, that's real art... Com'on. It's all about the bucks. Which is exactly why the bucks need to go away so that the real artists can get back in the music making business.

I'd say that's "your" fault (you being the great unwashed mass out there) for not supporting decent artists and pouring money into crap.

I think the key phrase in my comment above was:

Sure, if they have a full time job they're unlikely to have the time and energy to produce much, but...

I don't think we're going to see much "real" art if the bulk of the art produced is by people who have to work an additional full time job for a living. Yes, I'm aware there's a handful of exceptions to the rule, but there always are. Most of the music I've fallen in love with was written or performed by professionals. I don't think Shostakovich would have churned out fifteen symphonies without being able to devote himself full time to the task. I don't think Talking Heads would have produced 10+ superb albums without having the time to devote to their creation.

Arguing there are too many crap "artists" and suggesting this would in some way be solved by withdrawing the money from all of them is really not going to help. There are too many crap "anythings", I'd have thought that anyone working in the tech industry would know that...