A few years ago you could purchase practically any song you wanted from the Russian music site AllofMP3. And the songs were dirt cheap. While you had to pay Apple roughly a buck for every song you purchased legally in the US, AllofMP3 charged just a few cents per song. If that all sounds too good to be true, the RIAA thought so too. The US recording industry trade group took legal action against AllofMP3 in late 2006, and Russian authorities shut down the service in 2007.

Last week the RIAA dropped its complaint against AllofMP3. An RIAA spokesperson told Bloomberg that there wasn't much reason to continue with the suit, since the site had been shut down.

But as TorrentFreak points out, the same people who created AllofMP3 now have another site that's nearly identical. The only difference we can find is that it has a new name - Mp3Sparks. Like its predecesser, the site sells music at ridiculously low prices, and doesn't appear to pass any of the proceeds along to artists in the US. So we're pretty sure that the RIAA will be filing another suit soon. Or claiming victory and pretending the new site doesn't exist. Definitely one or the other. Possibly both.

Oh brother. AllofMp3 is notorious; Chased by governments and the music business alike, it struggled on longer than anyone could have predicted. It seems the saga of the now dead site isn't entirely over, as a Russian court has just told Visa that their decision to end the merchant contract held by the rouge mp3 site was against Russian law.

It means little for the already dead AllofMp3.com but, Visa's termination of that contract was likely a major contributing factor to the site's decline and fall. A spokesperson for Visa says they have no plans to appeal the ruling.

[via ZeroPaid]

The bane of the international music industry - Russia's pirate music site, AllofMP3.com has finally been closed by the Russian Government - but a new site has sprung up to take its place.

AllofMP3.com has been trading for a number of years by flagrantly selling cheap unlicensed albums from major international record labels, although the site claimed that it was legal under Russian law, it was clear that the site had no license agreements with record labels. Over the past year the site had become the focus of Russia's failure to deal with its endemic intellectual property piracy problems - the US had used the site's existence to threaten Russia's membership to the World Trade Organization.

But when it comes to the AllofMP3 saga, it would appear that it's gone but not forgotten. Shortly after closing down AllofMP3.com, the ''brains' behind AllofMP3 launched a sister site - http://www.mp3sparks.com, which featured the same interface, downloads and graphics as the original site.

However, it seems that perhaps the Russian authorities decided to act a little faster this time because shortly after its launch, MP3Sparks also appeared to go offline. Of course I wouldn't hold my breath on it staying that way.

Last week I reported on MusicForMasses, a new program from questionable Russian online music retailer AllOfMP3 that lets you download and listen to every song in their expansive library for free, provide you use their very limited Windows player that requires a net connection. Well, as I predicted in that post, it didn't take long for someone to figure out how to get around MusicForMasses' DRM. The cheekily-named MusicForMe is a program that strips out whatever protections AllOfMP3 is using on its free MP3s and turns them into plain old MP3 files that you can play in the player of your choice. Now, given that AllOfMP3 is of questionable legality in the first place, using MusicForMe is undoubtedly all kinds of illegal, not to mention of entirely unknown origin and infested with who knows what, so under no circumstances do I recommend that you download it from this link. I did try it out myself, though--in the name of science, of course--and it seems to have worked flawlessly. One caveat is that the resulting files have names like "00E117A8.mp3," but their ID3 tags are intact and accurate, so an MP3-renaming program should make short work of them. Seriously, though, MusicForMe is probably totally illegal and possibly dangerous, so use it at your own, not insignificant, risk.

[Thanks, Josh!]

Update: As a number of readers have point out, the original download link is busted. The author has released an updated version of MusicForMe, which includes the MusicForMasses program. Reader Josh says that this program does the same thing as MusicForMe, but works better. I haven't tested either program, much less screened them for viruses, so as always use at your own risk and don't blame me if things go south.

Well, this is interesting. Russian digital music store of questionable legality AllOfMP3 has just launched Music for Masses, a new Windows app that lets you download and listen to an unlimited number of tracks from their enormous catalog for free. Of course, there's a small catch: The files you download, which are ostensibly 128kbps MP3 files, have a .mp3x extension and are encoded in such a way that they can only be played in the Music for Masses player. As you might guess, the player isn't exactly full-featured, providing only very basic playback functionality--it doesn't even have shuffle! It also requires you to be connected to the internet to listen and contacts AllOfMP3's servers before playing each song. In order to use it you have to have to have an account at AllOfMP3.com, where you can download the .mp3x files by clicking on the "Free mode" tab on the track ordering page. For people who want access to a wide selection of free (as in fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck) music without fussing with P2P apps and who aren't picky about their media player, Music for Masses might be a great choice, but for the rest of us there are better ways to listen (not to mention it won't be long before someone figures out how to configure those .mp3x files to plain old MP3s).

[Via P2P Blog]

Uber-cheap quasi-legal Russian music store AllOfMP3 has released a beta of a new app for Windows and smartphones called allTunes that puts a slick interface around the download service. TechCrunch's Nik Cubrilovic is a longtime AllOfMP3 customer and was impressed with the Windows version of allTunes, and he gives high marks all around, especially appreciating the "Preview" feature that lets you stream entire songs at low bitrates for free. In the comments, which get pretty fiesty, he also certifies that allTunes is spyware free. All About Symbian reviews the mobile version and declares ithe beta interesting but wanting. AllOfMP3 charges $0.02 per megabyte downloaded, and songs are available in a variety of DRM-free formats including lossless.