RutunesDigital Music, Computers, Internet…

It is known that MP3Fiesta has been out of action for a long time. Ignoring customer support emails and failing to sort out their billing system has resulted in rendering their business useless. It was only time before their (free) weekly credit-hand-outs would wear thin.
What happened to AllOfMP3 when it was forced to convert itself to MP3Sparks, due to mounting legal pressure is now happening to MP3Fiesta. With billing disabled and sign-ups redirected to MP3Panda.com, MP3Panda could possibly be the new MP3Fiesta.

MP3Fiesta is a very popular website (ranked 4934 by Alexa) and with popularity comes unwanted interest from music companies and organizations, for example RIAA and IFPI. If anything infringes  their business, will do all they can to take you down. Since MP3Fiesta is hosted in a different country taking it to court would be a very tedious and long winded affair, so the other option would be to attack the payment processors. Knocking down the payment processors would make the business useless as customers would be unable to refill their accounts and purchase music. As most credit/debit cards are owned by American firms and most people have one, big corporate bullying from the music organizations would most likely force payment merchants into taking transactions offline. It only takes a matter of time before the domain is blacklisted against all banks. This is what happened to AllOfMP3 and their solution was to simply move to another domain.

MP3Fiesta has not had a good reputation for good business etiquette; stories posted from Aom3.org members give you an idea what it’s like when things go bad when you’re an MP3Fiesta customer. For the past two months the MP3Fiesta financial aspect has been struggling. With very low balances and continuing pressure from IFPI hunters, it has made it impossible for MP3Fiesta to recover from such a dire point in business. Ditching its valuable domain, partners, branding, customer loyalty and taking their internal forum offline to keep matters inside, we will now most likely see the disappearance of a popular drm-free music shop, MP3Fiesta and see how it plans to keep MP3Panda alive through 2009.

While I have a love-hate relationship with MP3Fiesta, they seem to continously pushing the boundry with me. And recently I have decided to temporariliy stop using them altogether and give my money to a different a shop. The lack of support and poor payment method are the main factors for MP3Fiesta losing me as a customer. If you have any problems refilling your account for whatever reason at any shop, be sure to check out this thread at aom3, where members (including myself) have recommended music shops based on their payment method record and it’s a good little find, for people who regularly use these shops.

As taken from this aom3 thread, here are this months music shop bonus offers.

MP3Fiesta.com
Recommend-a-friend referral scheme. Get a friend to sign up an account via your url and you will get a $50 bonus on your own balance. Click here.

$100 USD + 25% Bonus ($25 For Free)
$50 USD + 20% Bonus ($10 For Free)
$40 USD + 15% Bonus ($6 For Free)
$30 USD + 10% Bonus ($3 For Free)

MP3sale.ru
€30 (+ €10 FREE)
€50 (+ €50 FREE)
€100 (+ €50 FREE)

MusicMP3.ru (e-gold)
€29.9 + 10% Bonus (€3 FOR FREE)
€39.9 + 15% Bonus (€6 FOR FREE)
€49.9 + 20% Bonus (€10 FOR FREE)

MP3skyline.com / MP3xclusive.com
$45 USD + 33% Bonus ($15 For Free)
$35 USD + 15% Bonus ($5 For Free)

GoMusic.ru
75 USD +10% bonus
90 USD +15% bonus
120 USD +20% bonus

Legalsounds
USD $39 and get 50 free songs
USD $50 and get 80 free songs
USD $100 and get 200 free songs

Many people have emailed me asking where the reviews are for music shops such as MP3Sale and MP3Fiesta. As Rutunes is now a blog, all the original hand-written reviews have now been moved to Aom3.org, the community site for digital music shops as well as a resource hot-spot for digital music buying.

So consider this post as a shout-out for the information that aom3 has to offer.

The music shop reviews section in aom3 offers some truely fantastic extensive reviews on music shops, written by members of aom3.The reviews section is very helpful and you can see what ratings members of aom3 have given to various shops.

Highlighted Reviews
MP3Sale review
MP3Fiesta review
Lavamus review
Legalsounds review

[Aom3 Music Shop Reviews]

Aom3 has also put up a detailed comparison table for all music shops, where you can sort shops by price, features, payment options etc.. Very helpful when you want to find a shop with a specific payment option, e.g. paypal.
[Aom3 Comparison Table]

As well as the strong community that powers aom3.org, there is a freebies mailing list, that sends out free gift certificates and information on bonues updates for various shops. Aom3 have already achieved in sending out 500+ free gift certificates for Lavamus.com. Its free to sign up and your email address will not be shared out to any 3rd party orgnisation.
[Aom3 Freebie Mailing List]

So these are just a few gems on what Aom3 has to offer. Feel free to check it out.

[Aom3.org Forums]

Despite free education, a free national health service and one of the best government tolerability towards immigrants in the world, living the UK isn’t that great. More importantly , UK has poor Internet speeds compared to Eastern Asian countries,  late in getting the latest movies, music and technology. But one thing UK people are happy about, is the weakening dollar. With everyone flocking to American shopping websites and eBay USA, it means UK people are happy to enjoy buying products from USA when the price is much lower than in the UK.

This also applies to digital music shops. At the lowest price of $0.09 per track offered by LegalSounds, that means (approx) £0.045 for UK customers. At an average of 12 tracks per album, it comes to £0.54 per album. Play.com offers albums at around £6.99 each, so its common for UK customers to be pleased to live in the UK for once, as the find their digital music from shops like MP3Sale, Legalsounds, MP3Fiesta etc..

MP3Fiesta had been a solid recommendation by aom3.org community for a very long time, until during May 2008, MP3Fiesta literally doubled their prices from $0.10 to $0.20 per track. While still very cheap in comparison to other mainstream digital music shops, they dropped themselves down 3 places to 5th spot when comparing price/track.

A lot of customers were outraged that overnight their balanced were 1/2 in value without any notification from the MP3Fiesta team. The flooding of angry emails and posts to MP3Fiesta did nothing in restoring the original price scheme and customers were left forced to adapt.

It is speculated that MP3Fiesta rose the price to protect themselves from recent global economic instability and the worsening value of the dollar ($). What could be more convenient would be to change to a completely different currency, as MP3Sale did by changing to the Euro (€), however changing the currency could of had a detrimental effect since that majority of MP3fiesta visitors are from the US (20%), so MP3Fiesta stuck with the dollar and increased the price of their goods.

With the all the negativity and angry faces, MP3Fiesta has continued to grow and dominate this type of music industry, surpassing MP3sparks and all other ‘discounted’ digital music shops. From June 07 - June 08 MP3Fiesta experienced 670% growth in visitor traffic and according to alexa is in the top 5,000 visited websites on the Internet.

[MP3Fiesta.com]