It's just arbitrage. In canada, drugs are cheaper so if someone in canada sells drugs to the US, they are just making a profit based on their locational advantage. In Russia, cd's are much cheaper (I understand it's around $1-$3 US dollar). Thus they are just making a profit based on their locational advantage.
I'm not an expert on the music industry, but this is what I know of the situation. No matter what, the artist gets screwed. If you buy a cd in the US, the artist gets their 3% or whatever it is now. 3% of a $15 cd is $0.45. If you buy a cd in Russia, ROMS won't pay the music studio any money. But since cd prices are so low in Russia, the artist is only getting some cut of $1-$3 dollars. If a cd sells for $3, the artist would have to get 16% or better from ROMS to beat the record label's 3%. That's only $0.48 per cd. And then, no matter where the cd is sold, the artist still has to pay back the studio for the recording costs. So if you sell 1 million records as an artist, you may or may not make any money after paying back the studio. And I'm probably overstating the money artists get too, because I'm assuming they get a percentage of revenue, which I'm almost certain they don't. Instead, they get a percentage of profits. Then the artist has to go out on tour to start making money. This is why you can be a hot selling artist and be bankrupt.
By comparison, the producer gets 3% as well, but doesn't have to pay the studio anything for recording costs. Even if the band is not super successful, he will still make money.
Thus if I was an artist under a recording contract, I would consider any type of service that generally lowered the price of music anywhere to be an enemy. That would include allofmp3, apple, and walmart. The higher the profit on cd sales, the bigger my slice of the pie.
dfi