Slashdot Mirror
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 :)"
It doesn't rip it on the fly, it encodes it on the fly. Big difference (thousands of CD-ROMs???)
More importantly, has anybody tried this? I found it many months ago, but I am loath to send my credit card data to a semi-shady Russian site, and I am worried that credit card records could be used to go after people who used the site when it (inevitably) gets shut down eventually. What do people think?
$5 for 500 megabytes. Now this is more like it.
allofmp3.com isn't legal, it migth be in Russia, but that doesn't mean that people outside russia can buy from them legally. If they wish to tell to say Denmark, they must have an agreement with KODA (Danish RIAA), THEY DON'T. Same deal as with Spanish weblisten, legal in Spain, not outside.
It might be a nice service, but I won't recommend using it. If they do not have a deal with the RIAA equivalent in what ever country you're in, it is a waste of money.
Don't trust sites that sell music that doesn't have an agreement with a record label or the artists.
If you think that then you must live in some authoritarian state like ....
Who'd have thought it... Russia..the home of the brave and the free.
*RIA* aren't bad in principle, quite the contrary. If they get too much power and abuse it (and let's face it, too much power always leads to abuse), then that can be bad. But ideally they're representing artists rights, put to that position by artists, just as good or bad as for example EFF can be. It's just that money tends to corrupt everything.
This is a great example of the free market combined with the internet. I'm able to buy goods and services from wherever it suits me.
That's exactly the same argument that can be used for outsourcing IT jobs. You can't have it both ways people! You can't have your cheap consumer economy in the US, and still want your jobs protected. Why not complain about the poor music industry jobs that are being "outsourced" to Russia?
While legal in Russia, it may not be legal in YOUR country to use their services.
Just a thing to bear in mind, if you want to keep a clean path.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
the poster is against outsourcing? Slashdot is a diverse group of individuals voicing their diverse opinions, which all conflict. I am tired of individuals saying "gotcha" when two completely SEPARATE individuals voice CONFLICTING opinions. Btw, if ALL prices (not just wages) were to drop at the same rate, then, yes, nobody would be complaining about outsourcing. The problem is that there are market inefficiencies that are keeping some prices the same while others go down.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
..then it probably is, and that's why I treat these claims with a hefty degree of scepticism. Let's look at a few points:
If they claim they're legal because "we're licensed as if we were broadcasting the material", then as far as I understand you have no right to make or keep a recording of anything they might broadcast. Broadcasting is "we broadcast it and you listen", and there's no automatic right to tape records off the radio.
It's highly possible that the reason they haven't been closed down is that taking legal action against shady Russian entities is extremely difficult at the best of times.
If they're interested in people uploading stuff *to* them in exchange for download rights, then the legitimacy of their source material seems doubtful.
Ultimately, applying Occam's razor to this story makes me wonder that if it's so spotlessly legal, why isn't everyone setting up stores like this on Russian territory?
Anyway, something here smells sufficiently fishy for me to be extremely sceptical of the wisdom of giving them money.
A company can move, source, produce and sell pretty much wherever it wants. However, as a consumer my possibilities to buy goods and services where I see fit is severely hampered.
Ever tried to buy something from an Amazon affiliate not in your part of the world? Heck, I'm in Luxembourg, and there's many articles within amazon.de that they refuse to ship to anywhere but Germany.
A Toyota Prius is 20000 USD in the US, and 25000 EUR over here. Can I import one from the US? Sure. Will Toyota US sell me one? Sure not.
Of course, I could jump through hoops and get my stuff (I sometimes do). But we're far away from having consumers being able to use globalization to his advantage...
Given that the site is located in Russia, it is (or at least was originally) probably intended mainly for Russian users. I doubt any of the service administrators speak native English. Think how you'd feel if you had a site in English and Russian, and Russian users called it "shady" because your Russian was bad. Then think again on your comment.
To be pedantic, the Russian site creates a copy specifically for you - once you've finished downloading it gets deleted - that might make a difference, not sure. This happens because the file you download is encoded specifically for you, with your own desired LAME (or whatever) parameters.
Q.
- Product placement - a well tested system that has helped reduce theatre and DVD prices for us all, with no apparent compromises made to the movies we watch. Indeed, some of us use this to fund our postings to Slashdot, and when I sit back, drink an ice cool refreshing Vanilla Coca Cola, and scan Slashdot.org on my Apple PowerBook, I can see the advantages straight away.
- Government grants - we the people benefit from music, so surely what we want is we the people to fund it. A minor increase in our taxes will ensure the money is well spent, providing grants for individual artists. A diverse and innovative range of music will be at our disposal, once those in charge of issuing grants determine what music deserves to be made, according, of course, to national community values. Of course, compromises will have to be made - music about sex, politics, religion, or that uses any of the words George Carlin was fined for protesting about his inability to use on television, will obviously not be made. We don't want tax payer's money spent on that kind of filth, and if the government issuing grants means that alternative sources of funding dry up, well, that's just a positive side effect that will keep America clean.
- Music can be funded through concerts - I don't need to tell you that I'd much rather pay $50 to see Orbital or The Chemical Brothers in concert than listen to them on my iPod lying on my bed with my eyes closed. I mean, can you imagine? Those samples, being acted out and mixed live. Definitely a viable way of funding music, because everyone who likes a particular type of music wants to see concerts and sees concerts as an appropriate way of listening to music.
- Isn't it about time artists just created music for the love of it? I mean, they're creating something, surely that's enough. Surely they should fund their day to day living expenses by working a full time job. Sure, if they have a full time job they're unlikely to have the time and energy to produce much, but that's better than being a lazy, scrounging, whiner who insists on making us pay them a few dollars for something that enriches our lives and helps make us happy. Our praise should be enough, surely? Ungrateful whiners!
And those are just the excellent funding ideas from the top of my head (actually El Reg's and the many Slashdotters heads, from memory.) Music can be free, all we have to do is not pay for it!You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That's exactly the same argument that can be used for outsourcing IT jobs. You can't have it both ways people! You can't have your cheap consumer economy in the US, and still want your jobs protected. Why not complain about the poor music industry jobs that are being "outsourced" to Russia?
NO, this is not like outsourcing.
What this is doing is using the industry's geographical price discrimitation against them.
They might charge $10 for a widget in the US and only $4 in Cambodia, so what's happening here it that the same goods are still being purchased from the same company, it's just the geographic price discrimination is being avoided.
Incidentally price controls like this are illegal in the US, it's just that nobody exists to deal with them on an internaional level. Thus, you can ship a DVD that won't play in Korea, but not one which won't play in Kentucky.
Life is too short to proofread.
But ideally they're representing artists rights, put to that position by artists...
That is not correct. The *RI* organizations represent the recording industry, not artists. Recording artists are represented by organizations like the Recording Acadamy and the Recording Artists Coalition --organizations which are often at odds with the RIAA.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.