you'll be happy to know they are no longer with ROM and haven't been since chronopay stopped doing business with online music distributers that were with ROM. Sorry I don't have the name for you but it's stated on the website.
That's the beef with aomp3. They weren't paying RIAA. ROM (Russia's version) would may muscians directly if they registered. aomp3 was paying ROM. Now it seems they have joined some other digital rights management company that pays musicians, but chronopay (eu's version of paypal) accepts. chronopay stopped accepting onine retailers associated with ROM (guess under who's pressure). chronopay is 100% legit.
There is also substantial controversy about U.S. regulations aomp3 fell under since no physical cd was changing hands, they could have been considered 'radio'. even if a physical cd changed hands, there are no laws preventing importing cd's. our laws do need updating, but those aren't the laws being updated.
Let's see, ITunes pays $.6 - $.10 per dollar to musicians (not including a few lawsuits saying they weren't even getting that, but closer to $.4 / song) and royalties from radio play is even less. How much do you think musicians are loosing?
aomp3 was the most innovative distributer on the net. to heck with the price. i paid as much for a song as i'd pay anywhere but i could get it in the format i wanted, at the bitrate i wanted. i did not want crummy sounding music at 128 kpbs! aomp3 charged just as much for high quality encoding in a lossless, DRM free format of my choice.
what a concept. giving the customer what they want. it's a scarey day that Russians are more capitalistic than the U.S. has become.
You can find an updated RIAA list of labels here - http://www.riaaradar.com/
The website looks like they try and stay current. The website also offers a tool that will tell you if that label is RIAA associated. I've been using Riaa Radar's tool to find similar non-RIAA associated music for several years now and I'm extremely happy with the music I probably would have never known about otherwise.
A couple of things that have made the issue more complex: the RIAA has been known to inflate their membership roster and require Indie labels to sue inorder to be removed (the indies were afraid RIAA association would hurt their sales). Inflating the RIAA roster helps them claim they represent "90% of the music sold in the United States" (which most of congress seem to believe). Secondly, the RIAA has known it's been unpopular for years and that people were avoiding buying their members labels. So larger labels began to dividing off and renaming smaller labels to seem independent.
There's rarely a good reason why a trade organization feels so compeled to keep their membership secret. Do you think RIAA knows that downloading hasn't caused their loss in sales?
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you'll be happy to know they are no longer with ROM and haven't been since chronopay stopped doing business with online music distributers that were with ROM. Sorry I don't have the name for you but it's stated on the website.
There is also substantial controversy about U.S. regulations aomp3 fell under since no physical cd was changing hands, they could have been considered 'radio'. even if a physical cd changed hands, there are no laws preventing importing cd's. our laws do need updating, but those aren't the laws being updated.
Let's see, ITunes pays $.6 - $.10 per dollar to musicians (not including a few lawsuits saying they weren't even getting that, but closer to $.4 / song) and royalties from radio play is even less. How much do you think musicians are loosing?
aomp3 was the most innovative distributer on the net. to heck with the price. i paid as much for a song as i'd pay anywhere but i could get it in the format i wanted, at the bitrate i wanted. i did not want crummy sounding music at 128 kpbs! aomp3 charged just as much for high quality encoding in a lossless, DRM free format of my choice.
what a concept. giving the customer what they want. it's a scarey day that Russians are more capitalistic than the U.S. has become.
A couple of things that have made the issue more complex: the RIAA has been known to inflate their membership roster and require Indie labels to sue inorder to be removed (the indies were afraid RIAA association would hurt their sales). Inflating the RIAA roster helps them claim they represent "90% of the music sold in the United States" (which most of congress seem to believe). Secondly, the RIAA has known it's been unpopular for years and that people were avoiding buying their members labels. So larger labels began to dividing off and renaming smaller labels to seem independent.
There's rarely a good reason why a trade organization feels so compeled to keep their membership secret. Do you think RIAA knows that downloading hasn't caused their loss in sales?