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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.
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?
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...
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.