AllOfMP3

In May 2007, UK police arrested a 25-year-old man on fraud charges for selling allofmp3.com vouchers on sites such as eBay and allofmp3vouchers.co.uk. The man was reported to be funneling money from the sale of these vouchers back to the owners of the site in Russia.^[13] A statement in relation to this alleged transfer of funds to Russia was made by the British Phonographic Industry chairman.^[14]

In 2007 Allofmp3 was banned from service by its payment processor ChronoPay.

In an interview with p2pnet, a MediaServices representative said "It is disappointing that United States Trade Representative Susan Schwab completely and deliberately mischaracterized AllofMP3.com. Furthermore, it is irresponsible to use AllofMP3.com as a negotiating instrument in an attempt to extract concessions from Russia in return for US support for accession to the World Trade Organization".^[15]

In July 2007, a Moscow court ruled that

In January 2008 The Register reported that MP3Sparks.com and its associated web sites were being hosted (since December 2007) by

In June 2007, AllOfMP3 announced on their site that they were "closed for maintenance", while Times Online reported that an unnamed person claiming to be an ex-employee told them it was closed down following pressure from the Russian government. MP3Sparks, however, remained available,^[20] as did the AllTunes download service.

Following the acquittal of Denis Kvasov by a Moscow court in August 2007, a brief message was posted at the site's blog, stating "The service will be resumed in the foreseeable future".^[21]

About the services

The sites offer Russian and English user interfaces. All functions, except for the buying of songs and full length song previews, are available to unregistered users (and full length preview of songs is restricted to individuals who have spent a total of $50 or more on the website). Registration is free. The store maintains an account balance for each user; while a user's account has a positive balance, they can continue downloading music. To do so, the user selects the files for download from the store's catalog.

Pricing model

Unlike some US-based music stores such as

The sites operate using a pre-paid balance method. Users fund their account using a credit or debit card, in increments of US$10 or more.

However, action taken in late 2006 by

Users outside UK and US can also pay using a variety of credit cards at ChronoPay processor. ChronoPay had announced on March 20, 2007, that they would no longer be processing payments from online Russian music stores that only hold a ROMS license (e.g. AllOfMP3), but this does not apply to MP3Sparks which has an NP FAIR license.^[24]

Between April and June 2007, it had become difficult for users to fund their AllOfMP3 accounts themselves, and a number of users and sites began selling AllOfMP3 gift vouchers on the Internet. However, in May 2007 a man who had been selling vouchers was arrested in London,^[25] and this led many other voucher sellers to shut down their operations.

Download formats

AllOfMP3 (and now MP3Sparks) allows users to choose from a variety of

• MP3
• WMA
• Ogg Vorbis
• MPEG4-AAC
• MPC

Select albums are also being made available in

• FLAC
• PCM
• Monkey's Audio
• OptimFROG
• WMA Lossless

Most music is encoded straight from source, which is dubbed Online Encoding Exclusive, so gapless albums could provide gapless playback, unlike most other music services. There is no extra charge for using the Online Encoding Exclusive service. The user sets the codec parameters, including the desired bitrate, allowing for superior quality over other music download services such as iTunes and Napster.

Downloaded files do not contain

The websites also offer free, full album previews, streamed at a bitrate of 24 kilobits per second (roughly equivalent to analog telephone audio quality). Registered users who have spent less than $50 have access to 90 second samples, and unregistered users have access to 30 second samples.

Music for Masses

In late 2006, AllOfMP3 experimented with a feature called "Music for Masses" which allowed users to download DRM-protected music for free.^[26] The files were encoded in a proprietary MP3 format (.mp3x) that could only be played in the Music for Masses player, and could not be transferred to a portable media device. However, the DRM protection was cracked within a week.^[27] Although AllOfMP3 released a compulsory update to the player software which rendered the original crack unusable, they eventually removed the service in December 2006.

References