Ask Slashdot: Which International Online Music Stores Are Legit?

rjnagle writes "I'm an American lover of music who is interested in buying legally music from other countries. How do I know which CD/online music stores are legit and actually benefit the artist? I'm very cost-conscious and prefer indie music anyway, but the types of international music for sale on Amazon/iTunes tends to be from the bigger labels. Suppose I wanted to buy music from Pakistan/Ukraine/China/Brazil/Chad. What's the best way to identify which labels or online stories are authorized to sell them? Perhaps all I need is a list of the best known online music stores for each region (Yesasia.com, etc)."

Comments

actually benefit the artists?

[Anonymous Coward]

None. Bottomline buy direct whenever possible. Contact the artist if you can't.

All of them

[gmhowell]

All of them are legit for certain values of 'legit', 'international', 'music', 'benefit', and 'artist'.

In other news, we have always been at war with Eastasia.

Seriously, if you find a store that meets ALL of those criteria, anywhere, it'll be the first. I think the only way to do that is to find a copy of the music anywhere you want, then throw a buck or ten to whomever you decide is the artist. In the case of a RIAA (or local equivalent) band, there's a good chance that the actual artist is not the official artist of record.

Re:All of them

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you have the advertisers, without which you would have never heard of the band.
And manager (shit does not just happen, someone has to make it happen, I'd guess it is rare that it is the band that does that).
And post-production team to make it sound good.
And the accountants to ensure taxes are filed in time and correctly.

And I'm sure 10s to 100s of other people that turn a band into viable business.

You could say that you only need to throw the money at the band, and let them handle all that shit.
And the band could say "throw it at the manager, we deal with the music, they handle all that shit".
Then the manager could just say "throw it at the label, they handle most of that shit more cost effectively than I".

Re:All of them

[alexander_686]

Why focus on chart music when we should be focusing on music?

If a buy a Star Wars soundtrack, should I kick my money over to John Williams or the London Symphony Orchestra?

Face it – there are a lot of people who can write music but can’t carry a tune – see Bob Dylan. And there are a lot of people who can carry a tune but can’t write.

Not everybody can be a singer, songwriter, and business manager.

Re:Hard to tell

[Xest]

That and I think "legit" and "benefit the artist" are largely mutually exclusive most of the time.

National and international music federations like the RIAA, IFPI, etc. seem to get to decide what sites are and aren't legit, yet they're also the organisations whose sales least benefit the artist.

As someone else said, paying the artist direct where possible is the best option, but even that assumes the artist has the rights to sell directly their produce and hasn't signed over all sales rights to an organisation as described above.

Re:Hard to tell

[jonwil]

Look at what happened to allofmp3.com. Followed all the laws in Russia. Paid all the required money to the Russian music licensing agency. Yet it was still targeted by the RIAA who claimed it was "illegal"

I suspect it would be quite hard to find any digital music store in some of these Asian countries that is both accessible to the USA AND would be considered acceptable/legit by the RIAA.