The most common way a website promotes itself is through the use of advertising. However, when a very popular website runs into legal issues or goes down for a few days, this leads consumers to the belief that it has been shutdown and thus the news about this goes widespread. Well, according to the Register, this seems to be just what happened with the controversial Russian music download store AllofMP3.com.
Just recently, the Russian authorities seized several of the AllofMP3 servers and then all the sudden the website went down with a basic message saying it is down for maintenance. After a few days, this lead people to believe that they were ordered to shut down and thus there was widespread news about this downtime just before the website came back up again. While this downtime meant an inconvenience for its customers and lost sales during those few days, it also doubled up as effective advertising for the site, since statistics by Alexia shows that traffic to the website has over doubled from around 600 per million to around 1,300 per million; exceeeding that of even Napster.
Unlike DRM based music services like iTunes, Napster, Yahoo and so on, AllofMP3 allows its customers to purchase music encoded in a choice of a wide range of audio codecs, with some songs offered up to CD quality. However, unlike other music services, they charge by the Megabyte and only appear to pay royalty charges for "broadcasting" the music instead of by the song, since they are relying on a loophole in the weak Russian copyright law.
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It's interesting to compare AllofMP3.com's reach results with those of Napster.com, which launched free music streams on 2 May. The resulting press coverage and consumer interest pushed the website's reach from around the 300 per million mark - the site was primarily a promotional tool up to 2 May - before jumping to around 1550 on the day of the free music launch. Napster.com's reach fell off almost as precipitously in the days after the launch, falling to just over 400 per million, a small gain on its past performance, but hardly the boost the company was undoubtedly looking for. The full article can be read here. |
It would be nice if AllofMP3 did pay artists a portion of each track, since as Artists often get paid as little as 5 cent per song on iTunes and other legal music services, AllofMP3 could easily do the same without significantly pushing their prices up. In fact, despite most music industry's claims that online music stores cannot successfully operate without restrictive DRM measures, AllofMP3 has clearly proven that this indeed can be done and rather than the music industry following their success, they simply complain about their lack of DRM without even paying attention to how well they the service is selling music without DRM!
Feel free to discuss about AllofMP3 and other online music services on our forum.
Source: The Register - Hardware
