THE TECHWEB BLOG

According to recent news reports, renegade music download site AllofMP3.com is still in business in spite of the music industry's ongoing efforts to shut it down. I recently paid AllofMP3.com a visit -- and while it is still easy enough to shop at the Russian-based Web site, actually paying for your purchases is a somewhat more challenging process.

Actually, "challenging" may be the wrong word to use in this case; let's try "sketchy." I could also use a few other choice terms to describe a process that involved four different Web sites, cost me an hour of my time and $10 in cash -- and left me with absolutely nothing to show for my investment, until I happened across a blog entry that let me in on a little secret.

My virtual music-shopping junket started uneventfully enough. After creating a garden-variety, free account at AllofMP3.com, I proceeded to select a few cut-rate titles, dropped them into my shopping cart, and headed for the checkout page. It turned out that AllofMP3.com requires prepaid accounts to purchase tracks, with a $10 minimum balance to start. While I dislike paying more than the amount of my purchase, I knew that spending that much would be no problem -- and in any case, I wouldn't have much of a story to tell if I bailed out this early in the game.

I decided to pay my $10 by credit card. This is always a good idea, of course, since a credit card almost always provides a certain amount of fraud protection. In this case, it was also a good idea since the other two payment methods made little sense; I did not have a gift certificate to redeem, and the third option -- involving a PIN code purchased from a "partner site" -- sounded just a bit fishy.

As it turned out, however, AllofMP3.com was not taking credit cards at the moment -- or, I suspect, a lot of other moments lately. The fact that I had to click through two more screens to discover this fact was just one of many small, and some not-so-small, annoyances soon to come.

I am a naturally curious person, so I made the most of the silver lining in this cloud: At least I would get to find out where that fishy smell was coming from, since my only remaining option involved buying a PIN code from another, apparently affiliated Web site called allTunes. (It appears that allTunes also distributes some sort of music player/management application -- feel free to check it out, but I'll take a pass, thanks.)

My visit to allTunes involved creating another free login account; I then had the option of making a direct credit card payment to fill my AllofMP3 account, or of making a credit card payment to get a PIN code good for redemption on AllofMP3.com. Both options, interestingly, sent me to exactly the same credit-card payment form (which I can't link to, unfortunately, since it is only accessible to registered, logged-in users).

In any case, it looked as if I would shortly be getting my groove on with a fistful of discount music downloads. I whipped out my credit card and prepared to rock, until I noticed yet another hitch in the plan: allTunes only accepts Diners Club and JCB cards. I don't own either of those cards . . . and neither, I suspect, does anyone else on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

At this point, the most prudent thing to do would have been to log off both sites, clear my browser cache, run an anti-spyware tool a few times, and maybe dip my PC in boiling oil, just to be safe.

Yet I am not a prudent person; I am a journalist. And at this point, I was a journalist who was getting shafted out of a hard-earned $10. Thus inspired, I began to scour AllofMP3.com for clues about how either to get my money's worth or to get my money back.

Before long, I found another page that listed a payment option I had not noticed previously: something called an "XROST Prepaid iCard." The process of getting one of these prepaid cards involved a visit first to the XROST.biz site and then (via automatic redirect) to Firstgate Click & Buy, a German-based site that apparently serves as XROST's payment processor. I was ready for yet another gotcha to get me, and I was actually surprised when, a few minutes later, I finally had my XROST iCard PIN code -- and thus, I assumed, a way to buy something from AllofMP3.com.

Yet there was a final, and almost fatal, hitch in the plan: I could not find a page on AllofMP3.com, the XROST site, or even allTunes that would allow me to enter my XROST PIN code. At this point, thoroughly disgusted, I whipped off a semi-nasty email to AllofMP3.com customer support asking them to point me towards the PIN code entry page or simply to credit my account for the $10.

About an hour later, however, I actually found the page on AllofMP3.com to enter my XROST PIN code, get the money into my AllofMP3.com account, and make my purchases. I did not, however, get the URL (or, at this point, anything else) from the site's support staff. Instead, a Google search turned up this blog entry, which included the correct URL to enter my PIN code and credit my account.

Was the correct page right under my nose the whole time? Not exactly: According to the blogger who posted the link, AllofMP3.com had deliberately removed links to the page -- but not the page itself -- from its site. An earlier blog entry confirmed what I already suspected: Visa and Mastercard had already cut off payment processing for both AllofMP3.com and its "partner site" (now stuck in the faintly ridiculous situation of accepting only Diner's Club and JCB cards, while still trying to pretend that everything is still business as usual).

Clearly, AllofMP3.com is also taking heat from someone, presumably XROST itself (or perhaps even XROST's upstream payment processor), over the use of XROST-backed prepaid accounts. The ultimate source of that pressure is unclear, but it has been enough to force AllofMP3.com into a clumsy, ultimately doomed attempt to conceal one of its last financial lifelines connecting it to customers in the United States.

I am no fan of the music industry's stupid, ham-fisted dealings when it comes to intellectual property issues -- and it is far from clear whether AllofMP3.com is doing anything to violate Russia's own (and, by many accounts, thoroughly Byzantine) copyright laws. And presumably, the longer AllofMP3.com hangs onto its XROST affiliation, the longer it can do business with at least those customers who already know, or who manage to suss out, its deliberately obscured payment page. So, why not keep the secret, if only for a little longer?

For one thing, AllofMP3.com wasted quite a bit of my time dealing with its utter disaster of a "payment" system -- and I dislike having my time wasted, especially when it involves such a deliberate and badly-conceived effort to solve somebody else's problems.

For another, I am certain that other people have purchased XROST prepaid PIN codes, found no way to use them on AllofMP3.com, and walked away in disgust -- and, quite possibly, they lost significant time and/or money in the process. If AllofMP3.com sees fit to run its "customers" around like rats in a maze, then it is only fair to warn others what to expect -- and, more to the point, how to end up with something more than a headache (or maybe a bit of moldy cheese) for their efforts.

Yet I must admit that I am sorry to see AllofMP3.com entering what looks a lot like its endgame, both in legal and business terms. The state of the online music industry remains, almost without exception, utterly pathetic: Try to find another site, for example, that will give customers a choice of bitrates for their downloads. While AllofMP3.com many have been skirting too close to the edge and making too much noise for its own good, I suspect that the real reason the music industry targeted the site so intently was because it gave too many people too many crazy ideas about what a halfway-decent music download service should offer them. And these days, that may be the biggest crime of all in the eyes of an industry where "customer service" seldom rises above the level of a sick joke.