They offer to pay money to the artists of the songs they sell - in fact, the artist would get more money than if it were sold through iTunes or even on CD. The RIAA have forbidden them from accepting any payment though. THAT is the way forward. Cutting out the RIAA and any other middlemen. Artists will sell directly online through sites like AllOfMP3 (well, okay, not quite like them) and they will make more money, and customers will pay far less. Did you read the recent story about Prince? Prince decided to give away his latest album for free. The RIAA responded by threatening to remove all his music from being sold in shops or online. They're losing their grip. They won't be around too much longer, hopefully. There is. I can't remember any of the sites (because I listen to mainstream music), but there are very big sites where independent artists sell their music directly. MP3.COM does that in fact. Unfortuntaely the "owner" is not the artist...
If you thinking about making a website to download mp3's on I wouldnt really recommend. Only Itunes and napster are making good amounts of money and they put out alot of money in major advertising and co-marketing with major retailers. Your biggest competitor is torrents and limewire tho
This is true. There is little point producing a music download website, if you offer free music - legal problems, and as Primeelite pointed out, it's pretty much impossible to compete with the current providers at this stage.
Related to this, AllOfMP3.com got shut down (again) yesterday. It still has sister sites that are up though.
The russian allofmp3 have never been licensed to sell, or have never paid any artists, as far as I know... it's weird that people don't find it odd, that they can buy unlimited amounts of large US commercial artists for x bucks. I mentioned Magnatune - I also love their slogan... We are not evil. Also, Peter Gabriel has started we7, free music through advertising... which seems to be one way ahead, aswell as some kind of flat rate country based payment. I want good music. I want to listen to it first, and then I'll pay, so that the artist can keep entertaining me. But I do not want to pay $15 where the creative artist only gets 30 cents... doesnt make sense.
It is in fact licensed by ROMS which is the Russian coypright agency. So its legal in Russia, but basically nowhere else, although it doesn't try to claim it is legal elsewhere. They offered to pay artists directly, but the organisation that represents the artists (RIAA) says no. Believe me, if it were up to the artists, AllofMP3 would be a lot more successful because it would make the artists a hell of a lot richer than they currently are.
I'm not really knowledgable about the law, but I've always thought that it isn't illegal to download anything, it's illegal to distribute it without having the rights to it. I have never seen a case against file sharers for downloading a pirated movie/software/mp3, only for sharing them. I mean, how would one know you downloaded a movie or MP3? Really, the only way is if the MPAA or someone set up someone to distribute the movie and track IP addresses of those downloading from them, but then again that person received permission to distribute that perticular movie, so it wouldn't really be wrong, would it? Another example, that AllofMP3 site. They distributed the MP3's for low price, they are the only ones in trouble. The people paid to download illegally distributed MP3 files, but they weren't in trouble and they continued to do it. The only thing done was the larger company (RIAA?) was asking ISP's to block access to the website. I think alot of issues with music piracy lately are out of greed. CD's arent selling well anymore and because of the internet, artists don't need these people to distribute their music. The RIAA wants to cut this off before artists really start taking avantage of this.
To answer this question, the RIAA (and MPAA) created spyware which was replicated through networks such as Kazaa, and reported back which files were on any given users machine, both shared and non shared. So yes, they do know what you (well, "you" being those unfortunate enough to get infected with said spyware) downloaded.They stopped doing that though after a court case, as far as we know, being that it was much more illegal than actually pirating music. But you're right, people are being sued for sharing as opposed to downloading, AFAIK. But thats more of a case because the distributors are the bigger fish than single downloads.
Russian laws are now being changed to fight music piracy as well as RIAA and other companies are starting to block other countries that do not have strict music piracy laws by not allowing their websites and so on and they still have some jurisdiction because it is considered stolen. As far as Kazaa and Limewire and so on I was told by my internet provider that as long as you do not share the files after you download then they are not coming after those people they are just going after the ones who share the files. I found this out after i had just set mine in the default to share the files and I was contacted by them as a warning that my internet will be shut down if i do not comply with their piracy laws.
But wasn't the point still they wanted to dump the prices to a minimum and thereby underpay the artists? I'll do a bit of digging into this - because I seem to remember, that they only offered to pay after all the trouble started... Russia is more or less the same as China, when it comes to copyright issues: a pain in the a**... they haven't done anything good for musicians or the industry.
Lets be clear. It is NOT illegal to provide free MP3s so long as you own the copyright or the copyright owner is fine for you to provide free MP3s. That may sound daft but there are a lot of artists out there giving away their music which is by no means illegal. Providing MP3s of other people's music? Think about it!
Part of the p2p legal network system... hard to inforce the strict rules. Its mainly the record companies that get hurt