This post about a possibly-legal online music store got mw wondering: Where do these places get their inventory?
I’m not referring to peer-to-peer “trading” but to businesses established in countries with liberal copyright laws (or enforcement)—allofmp3.com, the Russian site, for example. Their collections are too complete to be pirating the songs from online sources, but I can’t imagine that they buy all the CDs themselves and rip them.
Pirating and ripping. Where else? None of the record companies cooperates with them.
They skirt the law by selling outside the country. Anyone who tries to shut them down has to sue them in Russian courts (for a Russian site), and that’s expensive.
They had years and years to build up their resources at the very least. Hell, I remember in the old days when Napster was still relatively new, it wasn’t unusual to see someone with close to a thousand songs on their list.
Given the vastness of the net and piracy in general, anyone with enough time and resources could acquire thousands upon thousands of songs with no problem.