More on Allofmp3.com

After reporting Allofmp3.com yesterday, I decided to have a good nose through the legislation that covers it to work out why it's so cheap. There's a whole FAQ about it here, but it all boils down to this:

Russian copyright legislation allows phonograms to be performed publicly without the authorization of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission. (Article 39) The Internet could be deemed to fall under this exemption. The copyrights involved have to be paid to a collecting society.

So effectively, in Russia the legislation for downloading songs is the the same as for playing them on the radio. Hence the price diferential between Allofmp3.com and iTunes.

Anyway, I decided to give Allofmp3.com a whirl after I established that it was both legal and my card details weren't going to be pinched. Further reading shows that the card transactions are dealt with by a secure, legitimate company that has been certified by Diners Club, which put me at ease somewhat. I bought $5 of credit, which at today's tourist rates (according to the bloke on Breakfast News today) is about �2.90. And I went hunting for a song I've heard on Rocket Science a few times just recently - Venus by Television. I found it, I decided I wanted a 192kbps OGG of it and it encoded that for me, and I paid the princely sum of five cents for it. After that I picked up a few tracks that I wished I'd bought as singles back in the day, and some more late 70s rock from Elvis Costello. In all, 10 tracks for 46 cents (or 26p).

I'm impressed with their dedicated software as well (which is completely optional, but on a Windows machine is a doddle to use). It's not much to look at but works like iTunes does.

Flies in the ointment? Well, looking at the FAQ mentioned above shows that the big Western trade bodies are put out about it, but tellingly the IFPI are resigned to the fact that under current Russian legislation there's not much they can do about it. I think they're holding out for a Westernisation of the copyright laws in Russia, but there's more pressing things to worry about in Russia than Western record companies.

Going back to the costing before I finish this over-long post - how can the industry defend charging 99p for a crippled data file of a single song for non-open software when I've bought CD singles on the first week of release with three songs and a video for the same price? The cost of manufacture is, well, zero for the online sale, and the distribution infrastructure is markedly cheaper online than for physical media. By my reckoning they're overcharging us by about 70p a song using these prices - greedy sods!