A letter to the Guardian…
As Patrick Collinson says, the legality of Russian download provider allofmp3.com is questionable, but his dogmatic insistence that “real music fans should choose legal services” is simplistic and reminiscent of music industry propaganda. While the allofmp3.com model is certainly not the way to develop a healthy online music industry (I speak both as a professional musician and a user of allofmp3.com) it’s not enough simply to condemn users without examining why they shun the alternatives.
The biggest supplier, Apple’s iTunes Music Store, is typical of legal download services in that its prices barely compete with the major online CD retailers. Plenty of top name CDs can be bought for £8 or £9, often less, from Amazon or Play.com, but what do you get for your £7.99 at the iTunes store? Low bandwidth digital files, crippled with copy protection. Meanwhile the Russians are offering mp3 files up to 384k bandwidth, with an option of lossless (CD quality) downloads on selected albums. Many consumers are clearly happy with the bog standard listening experience, but others demand quality, and if the official marketplace can’t satisfy their (technologically undemanding) needs, they’ll go “underground”.
As Bobbie Johnson reported in the Guardian (4 March) the fault for this situation lies not with Apple and other legal download services, but with the major record labels, who charge exorbitant wholesale rates for their digital product. The fact that so many people are paying to use allofmp3.com (rather than simply using free, illegal P2P networks) shows that there’s an increasing willingness to behave ethically online. However, unless the music industry is prepared to charge reasonable wholesale prices reflecting the vastly reduced overheads of digital distribution, disillusioned music fans will continue to seek other options.