WastedTimes

[aiolos]

Today, we learn that that the Russian site, AllofMP3 is down, but not out yet. According to this story at Slyck, the controversial Russian music service is just recovering from having several of their servers taken by the Russian police a couple weeks ago. At the moment, they are simply down for maintenance. For years, AllofMP3 have been offering music for pennies a megabyte, even completely lossless versions-all without any DRM to speak of.

Here is a small snippet from a Reuters report published last week. The speech was given by the Russian President Vladimir Putin and apparently he means business. Possibly, the activity we are seeing lately at AllofMP3 is a result of this new posture:

"A necessary condition for developing new technology is more reliable protection of intellectual property. We must defend copyright inside the country. That is our obligation to our foreign partners," Putin said.

"We must also ensure protection of intellectual property rights of our own producers."

[jkf]

I've had an account with them for a few years but stopped buying any
songs from them about a year ago after they raised the prices. When
they first started up, you could get whole albums for about 25 cents US$.
It was worth it at that price than having to look for something all day...
but when I last looked, each song had gone up to about 25 cents or more
depending on the bitrate quality. They are still cheaper than the sites that are
recognized as legitimate by the recording industry, but you can't beat FREE.

[aiolos]

I guess that at those prices the site couldn't have been legitimate. The royalties alone would cost more than that.
On the other hand of course, sony (at least I think it's sony) is selling DVDs in china for $2. But if anyone bought them there and tried to sell them in Europe or the US they'd definitely sue him.

[aiolos]

It seems there's no such thing as bad publicity...

Just recently, the Russian authorities seized several of the AllofMP3 servers and then all the sudden the website went down with a basic message saying it is down for maintenance. After a few days, this lead people to believe that they were ordered to shut down and thus there was widespread news about this downtime just before the website came back up again. While this downtime meant an inconvenience for its customers and lost sales during those few days, it also doubled up as effective advertising for the site, since statistics by Alexia shows that traffic to the website has over doubled from around 600 per million to around 1,300 per million; exceeeding that of even Napster.

[hbgator]

yes jkf that was a great site, sometimes slow, but I always got a good download