Allofmp3 Restarts Business

An anonymous reader writes "With a pretty short message on their blog, Allofmp3 announced that they will resume their music store soon. According to a Russian court, their music store did not violate any copyright law in Russia, so there was no reason for them to keep it closed."

Comments

If you can't beat em', join em'

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe finally the RIAA will realize that allofmp3's pricing scheme and business model works and proves that if you price it right and don't use DRM, people will readily pay for music even if it is available for free on P2P.

allofmp3 provided/provides:
A great rating/linking system - "People who bought this also bought...","Similar artists..." - Great way to get "the word" out on new music without any advertising costs whatsoever.
Convenience - No DRM, no "special" download app that tied you to Windows (even if just for downloading). (Yes, there was allTunes, but you could always just download using a normal old browser)
Selection - allofmp3's selection was better than any other online music store I've used, except possibly for iTMS, although due to the DRM I haven't touched iTMS since PyMusique/SharpMusique stopped working.

They also happened to have great prices, but I'd happily pay double the prices of what allofmp3 charged.

Rather than try and sue them out of business, the RIAA should instead drive them out of business the capitalist way - with some nice good competition. Offer the same selection, convenience, organization, and interface as allofmp3, and compromise prices between allofmp3's (admittedly too low) and the RIAA's (way too high for "impulse buys" of tracks/albums I'm not sure about.

While the per-track/per-album price of allofmp3 is much lower, many people (myself included) spend MUCH more money in total there because at allofmp3's prices, there is little risk to buying a whole album as an "impulse buy" when you came for just a single track. RIAA pricing encourages single-track purchasing (odd, since the RIAA is so desperate to encourage full-album purchases.)

Re:If you can't beat em', join em'

[FauxPasIII]

> You can price anything right if you choose not to pay your suppliers.

... but enough about the RIAA.

Re:If you can't beat em', join em'

[Fallen Kell]

Again, included in their current price is the costs that they have to legally hold aside and give to ROMS when they sell a track/album. The money is already in ROMS hands, they have already collected it. And in ACCORDANCE with LAW! Just because the RIAA and IFPI (which is the new extension) do not like the law doesn't mean that they can do anything about it in the way they are trying (i.e. get the World Trade Unit, and the European Union, and the USA to force Russia to shut down a perfectly legal business by mandating that Russia will not be allowed to join the European Union until it shuts these places down, because they already tried to lobby for the laws to change and failed (it appears that the Russians are not a susceptible to "contributions" as their American and European counterparts)).

They are abiding by their laws as written. ROMS is the legal entity to send copyright payments to under Russian law. ROMS is setup to pay the appropriate copyright royalties to the proper owner(s) when officially notified by the proper owner(s). The check then goes in the mail (and future payments go in the mail as they arrive). They simply have a system in place to make sure the proper owner of the copyright is compensated, and not someone with the false claim to the copyright, and this is in accordance to LAW. Stop complaining that you don't like it. I don't like the fact that women in Saudi Arabia need to keep their heads covered, but that is the law in that country. Same thing with no being able to chew bubble gum in Singapore...