Buying music

[pne]

So, the other day Stella announced that she wanted to buy some music online, legally, to add to her collection, and asked me for some sites.

I told her of the ones I had heard of off the top of my head (Musicload, Media Markt, Saturn) and mentioned that there's also AllOfMP3 in Russia.

She had a look at Musicload, where a track cost €1.29, which she thought a bit steep; Media Markt and Saturn both priced them at 99¢ each.

She asked whether AllOfMP3 was legal, and I told her about what I had read (in c't and on Wikipedia); as I recall, both said something along the lines of "They claim to be legal since they have licences from the appropriate Russian organisation. And what's illegal in Germany is downloading music from obviously illegal sites. And since the law is so complex, it's hard to tell what's "obviously illegal", and a site available from Germany that says it's legal is, well, *nudge nudge wink wink IYKWIM AITYD (IANAL, TINLA)*".

So anyway, she had a look, and while tracks don't have a fixed price (they go by volume), a typical price for the ones she was looking at was 15¢ (USD, not EUR). Her reaction was, "Wow, that's a no-brainer: I'm going to buy them from here."

Unfortunately, they couldn't take credit cards, and neither of us particularly felt like signing up for yet another site that would let us pay them. So she ended up going with one of Media Markt or Saturn (don't remember which).

---

In vaguely related news, the iTunes Music Store used to sell single tracks for 99¢ here in Germany, which annoyed the music companies, who would prefer to charge more money for more-popular titles. So they reached a compromise: the music companies would allow Apple to distribute music without DRM, and Apple in turn would allow variable prices (from 69¢ through to €1.29).

Now it seems that since Apple made this change, the music companies have been making less money than before (heise.de news article in German). Heh.

Comments

[ephemera]

AllOfMP3's legality is borderline - it's ethical value, in terms of money getting to the folks who made the music, are clearer. No one's making any money of those downloads but AllOfMP3, which may or may not bother you ...

[pne]

Though if "money getting to the folks who made the music" is a big concern for you, then buying any music from a major music portal is probably not such a great idea if your interests lie outside the current top 100 charts... as far as I know, the portals don't pay the artists but have contracts with associations such as the GEMA (in Germany) or RIAA (in the US), who then take all the money and distribute it to their members according to some proportional formula they figured out in advance.

So whether you bought ten copies of flavour-of-the-month's latest album, or ten individual albums by lesser-known artists, Mr. Flavour-of-the-month will probably get the same amount of money, as will the lesser-known artists -- i.e., next to nothing for the latter, I would assume. AFAIK chart scoring is one of the criteria used for the distribution, under the assumption that the #1 hit will account for x% of all purchases, the #2 hit for y%, and so on. So I don't think the music portals actually tell the GEMA what albums were purchased; they just give them a cut of their profits and the GEMA decides who gets how much.

So if you want to see artists making money, buying straight from them seems to be about the only way of ensuring it.

(Also, I thought AllOfMP3's position was that they have a licencing deal with Russia's equivalent of the GEMA, and that they pay a proportion of revenue to them for them to distribute to artists. Your claim that they keep all the money entirely for themselves is the first one I've heard.)

[liv]

I recommend eMusic. It's really legal, and they actually compensate their artists. The downside is that you have to buy a monthly subscription, not just buy individual tracks, but the cheapest plans are quite cheap, and I think it works out at about 30-50¢ per track. The tracks are mp3s, good quality, DRM-free. And if you cancel your subscription you keep the music you've already downloaded (since without DRM, there's no way to stop you from doing so).

[pne]

That might be a solution if Stella were interested in buying "music", in the abstract -- according to Wikipedia, eMusic is more into indie music, and primarily a US company though they have a EU subsidiary now.

Stella's primarily interested purchasing individual tracks from a wishlist she has of music she likes, which is mostly 60's and 70's German pop -- so any non-German companies are probably less likely to carry that in the first place.

Also, when I had a look just now, all the obvious links on the main page I tried were "sign up now"... they didn't even let you look at their catalogue (in an obvious-to-me place) so that you could see what kind of music they have on offer before they ask for your name and address!

That sort of thing turns me off to online shops.

(I imagine whether that would fly with brick-and-mortar ones... people asking for names and addresses and insisting on issuing you a "valued customer card" before they'll let you in the door, even if you just wanted to browse.)

...and I double-checked just now whether I didn't miss something less obvious: no, they want your name, address, email address, and credit card info before they'll let you see anything. Um. Sorry.