Allofmp3. If you had heard of it, you’d know that for a time it was ‘the second most popular mp3 download site on the web’. It was popular because it was very inexpensive, and the customer could decide on the bitrate of their songs (ie the quality of the song).Also the music was DRM free (Digital Rights Management is a procedure used by mostly fruit based websites to stop the user playing a downloaded song onto anything other than the user’s fruit based audio device). This meant that after a song was downloaded from allofmp3, it could be played on your mp3 player (fruit based or not), your car stereo or even burned onto a cd and played on your Gran’s hi-fi!

If you hadn’t heard of the site, now you have….

You’ll see the statement ‘was’ is used quite a lot in the earlier section. This is because allofmp3.com is no more. Extinct, finished, scrapped, dead. And why is this you ask. Well, there was a large difference between what allofmp3 said it was giving back to the music industry, and what the music industry’s official voice was saying…. The site was located in Russia, and the law there actually permitted businesses to distribute music (not actual cds etc, just music), as long as a fee was paid to a collection society, which would deliver the money back to the copyright owner. These laws were formed pre internet, when the supply of music was via the radio.

So allofmp3 were saying they were giving a proportion to a collection agency, and the western music industry was saying they were being paid nothing. Both sides could be talking the complete truth of course, if no-one was applying for the money from the organization.

So the jist of it is that a proportion of sales could be with the agency, but the western music industry would not ask for it. Moreover why would they? Allofmp3 was selling mp3 tracks at a fifth of the price of iTunes. If the industry condoned this then they would effectively be admitting that their music was high-priced, and then, if everyone thought allofmp3 was whiter than white, rather than greyer than grey, the industry would need to sell five times as much music to make the same total of cash! Gotcha

(By the way - the going price for a cd in Russia at the time was about $2, so if you lived in Russia, allofmp3 wasn’t the unbelievable good deal that it was to users in Europe / USA)

Eventually the website was closed down by the Russian authorities, when noises were made in pretty high places that if Russia wanted to sign up to the World Trade Organisation, it’s most well-known mp3 download site would have to go. The site owners were later found innocent in court of breaking any relevant laws.

Naturally this created a mass of publicity. And guess what? Masses of copycat sites popped up to cater for the hordes of new-found low cost music downloaders, and the existing allofmp3 punters, all looking for an allofmp3 replacement. Some of these websites are excellent, some are average and some dreadful. They all keep to the cheap mp3 download route, a few managing quality also.

But none have the overall package of the original. That’s not unexpected as it would take a lot of graft to set up and maintain a comparable site. Who would do that if they may well be shut down without breaking the law?

allofmp3 RIP

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