AllOfMP3

» see allofmp3.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

allofmp3 sold music for money. that was the strange part. through 2002-2007 the global music conversation in turkey was about how to download songs without paying, and we were doing it through audiogalaxy and kazaa, or through the local mp3 cabinets at internet cafes. allofmp3 walked in offering the same files at ten cents a track payable by credit card, and somehow that was a viable product for years.

the company was mediaservices inc, registered in moscow and operating since 2000. the legal pitch was that allofmp3 had a license from a russian collecting society called the russian organization for multimedia and digital systems, often shortened to roms. roms was an analogue of the radio-station royalty agencies that paid out small amounts to artists for broadcast use, and the company claimed it covered digital downloads too. the major labels said roms had no authority to license digital sales. the russian licensing system said it did. that was the gap allofmp3 lived inside.

i never had a credit card that would work on a russian merchant site as a turkish university student. i looked at allofmp3 once or twice the way you look at a foreign car you cannot register at home. for most of the global market, the site was a real option, and by 2006 it had become the second-largest paid source of music downloads in the uk behind itunes, with prices roughly a tenth of apple's.

us trade representative susan schwab raised it as an obstacle to russian wto accession in 2006, and visa and mastercard withdrew payment processing across late 2006 into 2007. russia revised its copyright code in mid-2007. allofmp3 went into a maintenance limbo, and on july 2, 2008 the original site stopped serving. mediaservices spun up a sister site called mp3sparks that ran for a couple more years on the same model with weaker traffic.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

the pricing was per-megabyte, not per-track. an mp3 at 192kbps would cost about ten cents. you could pick the bitrate and the format yourself, including ogg and flac at the same price-by-size, which made the catalog more flexible than itunes was at the time. customers in europe and the us were paying real money for downloads that were technically illegal everywhere except russia, and the site published its bank-routing details so you could pay directly without a card. the user experience was better than the legal alternative for years.

the riaa sued mediaservices in december 2006 for $1.65 trillion. russia's gdp that year was around $1 trillion. the suit was a press release with a number on it rather than a serious legal instrument, and it got dropped in 2008 once the site was already off.

~ the postmortem ~

the trade story was the real one. russia had been negotiating wto membership since the 1990s and the us made allofmp3 one of the named obstacles. in june 2007 the russian duma adopted part four of the civil code, which folded music distribution into a stricter ip framework that took effect on january 1, 2008. that was the legal kill. visa and mastercard had already stopped processing payments for the site, owner denis kvasov had been criminally charged and then acquitted, and the catalog had moved most of its serving to mp3sparks. allofmp3.com itself stopped on july 2, 2008.

the russian government never directly confirmed pressing the button. the legal change was framed as wto compliance work that incidentally affected one of the most-trafficked russian sites. the timing was not subtle.

~ what got buried with it ~

the experiment of selling digital music at margins russia could legally support went with it. the model never really came back. the mp3 economy that replaced it was either subscription, which spotify launched a few months later in late 2008, or piracy through bittorrent, which had been happening in parallel anyway. ten cents a track for the user's choice of bitrate was a price point nobody else has hit since, because nobody else has tried to underwrite the catalog with a contested collecting-society license. allofmp3 was the only product of its kind, and the wto closed the category.

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