Comments on “A Kid in the Musical Candy Shop”
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30 Responses to “A Kid in the Musical Candy Shop”
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Meg10
So yeah - I hear you on the delema of short changing the artist, because they do totally deserve to get paid for their work. If they didn’t, they couldn’t make us new songs (and I, for one, love new songs). But my argument always is, with concert tickets being 40 to 80 bucks a pop just for crap seats, really, are they gonna be hurt if I get one album for 1.45 rather than 18 dollars? Plus, when you buy a cd, you’re paying not only the artist and the label, but the store you got it from, the employ behind the counter AND the people who packaged it. Really, I’m sure in the end, will allofmp3.com, the right people are still getting paid. And besides, if I had HALF the money an of these music artists have, I’d be a happy happy girl.
But thank you very very much for you review. It was incredably helpful!
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9
Hey Phil,
Boy, I hear you on the copy protection front — to my mind, when you paid for that CD, you paid for the right to listen to the music on it however you want, using whatever equipment you want. You didn’t just pay for that single individual piece of plastic.
Having felt burned (no pun intended!) by the music industry’s move toward copy protection, it sounds like any worries you might have had about services like AllofMP3 evaporated pretty quickly. And I take your point: for some of the music you buy, you might only listen to it a few times in your whole life anyway.
By the way, don’t forget you can always burn your iTunes music to an ordinary music CD (i.e. burn in audio CD format, as opposed to burning in CD data format). That’s part of the ‘fair use’ you are permitted when you buy the music. And music on an ordinary music CD can then be encoded back to your computer in any way you choose. The end result will likely have lost some quality in the process, but on the other hand it could at least be made to play on your MP3 player…
All the best,
Greg -
Phil8
I spent hours LEGALLY encoding all of my CD’s. I have purchased a few songs from the Itunes store. I was UBER proud of the fact the 4500 plus songs I have are legal. Then, I bought a CD at SAM GOODY. It would not encode on my Mac. I had to connect a cd player to my mic jack and record it. Yes, I am old enough to remember jacking my phonograph into my cassette recorder to make a tape of my vinyl albums. Then, I made the unfortunate discovery that the songs I downloaded from Itunes will not work in my Memorex MP3 player. That was the last straw. I had heard of All of MP3, but was concerned about getting ripped off, or “ripping off” the music industry. Those feelings went away when the music industry chose to prevent me from copying the CD I just paid for.
The way I see it, the songs are really only worth a few cents a piece anyway. I have so many songs, I cannot possibly listen to them all. From what I understand, the radio stations have to pay a few cents to the music industry every time they play a song. Hundreds, or thousands of people will hear that song for a few cents, so I think for me to download a song for 2 cents is fair and reasonable, especially since I will probably only listen to it a few times in my lifetime. -
7
Hi Darren,
Gosh, that sounds pretty bad!
I wonder how would something like that happen? If I’ve understood correctly, you visited the website but didn’t actually make any purchases — so, I’m guessing, you haven’t given them any personal details like name or credit card information? But still, they’ve managed to charge your credit card twice? Was your credit card issuer able to shed any light on the situation when you pursued the chargeback? (I.e., I imagine you will have disputed the charges, since you didn’t make any purchases, which would then lead the credit card issuer to investigate.)
I wouldn’t expect (or want!) you to reveal any personal information here, but I just wondered whether you’d want to fill in any of the details. I hope you’re able to get it all sorted out!
All the best,
Greg -
6
I visited this website, interested by the cheap mp3 files. However, twice they have taken money from my credit card and I haven’t ever made a purchase. I am not sure if my card was cloned of if they somehow got hold of my details. Avoid allofmp3.com
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5
Hi Warren,
That’s interesting — it looks like the site operates from the Russian Federation, under the same copyright law (loophole?) that permits allofmp3.com to function. It also looks very similar to allofmp3.com. I wonder whether it’s run by the same people, or does it just look similar?
I just had a very brief look, but I couldn’t find anything about the xrost-style indirect payment scheme that allofmp3 uses. Is it necessary to give mp3sugar.net your full credit card billing information in order to use it?
All the best,
Greg -
Warren4
I use mp3sugar .With music downloads of all popular artists at only USD 0.10 a song, this can be the final step for most people to buy music online and not download it using peer to peer software.
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Jane Smith3
My friends and I have discovered that EVERY ONE OF US has spent much more on AllOfMP3 in one year than we previously did on “legitimate” outlets (off or online) in any other year. The point is, because the price of what is to most of us a fairly disposable commodity (sorry, artists) is WAY too high, we rarely buy ANY music(about $100 per year each, we estimated). However, because the price per unit is SO reasonable at AllofMP3, we estimate we have each spent about $500 in the last year on music.
So, based on our little experiment, if prices were even vaguely reasonable through “reputable” outlets the industry as a whole would get five times more cash per consumer per annum than they now do (they would shift mabey ten times more product as well, but since few of us use physical CDs anymore the overheads should be minimised).
Sorry, no email, but you may have to hand these over in a court order to Sony one day so we can’t risk it! -
2
Hello RosePaws — it’s good to see you in this neck o’ the woods!
I’m 100% with you on returning control to consumers, and in general I have very little sympathy for record labels and their control over not just consumers, but also the artists who actually create the music. If the record labels are a squeaky wheel, they are one of the loudest and most irritating squeaky wheels around.
It sounds like your experience of services like AllofMP3.com is essentially empowering: for you, buying from them is much like buying from any other discounter, it offers value to you, it removes control from the record labels, and all of this is a good thing!
But still I wonder… You mention discount books. I think there’s an important difference between digital music and manufactured items like books. Unlike the case of books, the incremental cost for producing a second or a third or a five hundredth copy of a specific piece of digital music is very close to zero. In other words, once I (or AllofMP3.com, for that matter) buy a piece of music digitally, I can generate zillions of copies for virtually no investment. The upshot is that in the case of digital music, technology permits the original creator (the musician and, by extension, their record label) to be *completely* removed from the economic chain that would otherwise link buyers with producers: someone can sell a zillion copies without ever passing any of the revenues to the artists.
In the case of AllofMP3.com, what isn’t clear to me is whether the service *has* completely removed musicians from the chain. Yes, the Russian government gets money from the service, but do musicians ever see a penny? Do they see enough pennies?
I wonder how it would feel to buy copies of books that were actually produced by someone other than the original publisher, if you knew that the author would never receive a penny? What if I could buy the latest Harry Potter book for 20 cents from someone other than the original publisher, and I suspected that J.K. Rowling wouldn’t receive any of that 20 cents? The mechanics of manufacturing physical objects like books means we don’t have to face that situation, but what if we did?
Thinking about examples like that, as they bear on AllofMP3.com, still leaves me puzzled, ethically speaking…
All the best,
Greg -
RosePaws1
I don’t understand why you think this situation even involves a question of ethics. The company sells music downloads; people want to buy the music; and the company is not doing anything illegal by their country’s laws.
***In my opinion this is more about the squeaky wheel gets the grease.***
For instance: On Ebay one can buy new books at prices well below the actual publisher’s suggested retail price. Following your logic, with the music industries gripping, you would have us *debating* whether it’s ethical to purchase these new books, at a faction of their original cost, because the publishers and authors aren’t getting their *fair share*.
And what of the thousands of other manufactured New items being sold on Ebay, again at a faction of their original costs? Shall we feel guilty when we purchase these items because someone isn’t getting their *fair share* of the profits??? I think Not!!!
The music industry is bent out of shape because they can no longer *control* the consumers who purchase music. Consumers who in the not so distant past had no choice but to pay their outrageous prices. NOW, thanks to the world wide web, we have a Choice!
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