Freedom loving Russian website crushed by protectionist Westerners
Sadly, we have just seen the closing down of a magnificent example of the communist's revenge for all those jokes we used to make about how you could only buy 1960's goods in Moscow.
The highly capitalist world of the recorded music industry has managed to close down an entrepreneurial Russian website from which we could buy, cheaply, and download, almost every recent pop music CD you might want.
For less than a couple of quid you could get the latest stuff from the latest big thing.
The music industry didn't like it, as the only people who made any money from it was the website themselves, not the publishers or the artists. So, they mobilised all their influence - first they persuaded the credit card companies not deal with it, so it became pretty well impossible to buy anything, and now it's been closed altogether.
They’re now spouting a lot of righteous stuff from the industry claiming this shut down as being "another important step for the recording industry as we seek to direct consumers away from illegal online services towards the many legal alternatives."
That would be fine if there really were an alternative. If you pay a full price to download a track from one of the "legal" sites, you'll find what you get comes with a number of built in elephant traps - you'll probably find that it can only be copied 10 times, for example. Allofmp3 Tracks had no such restrictions.
So where is the "legal alternative"? Nowhere, that’s where.
Still, you can’t keep a good site down, and the cunning old Russians have pooped up again under another name www.mp3sparks.com. Same prices, same stuff, same management, I think.
On the internet, it’s called The Hydra effect - cut one head off and others will grow back in its place.
Webster
www.mp3sparks.com seems to have died already, but the old site has popped up at www.alltunes.com and so the game of hide and seek goes on...
Reader Comments (1)
I used Allofmp3 mainly to download baroque classics decades old for just a few pennies. Nowt like the old artists and orchestras et al and I believed this approach didn't bypass modern copyrights.
Mammon strikes again!