Alles Normales

In a word:
A story on how I’ve been making money by helping Internet illetirate people to find and buy rare (or just any kind of) music via Internet.

Long story:
The scope of this blog is misc. income generating ideas which emerge on a edge of ONLINE and OFFLINE worlds. OFFLINE world is mostly populated by masses of Internet illetirate people who do not speak/understand English - which are plenty in so called Third World countries (*provincial* Russia included - that’s where I’m from).

I’ve been into music for ages - like, last 20 years. Being into non-mainstream music of all kinds, I’ve been experiencing difficulties finding the music I happen to enjoy - it never was in sufficient supply in provincial Russian region I live in.

So, starting in mid 90s I began to get music from abroad of Russia - back in 1998 I even posted in local press a series of articles on a subject of “Netshopping: getting music from abroad”.

In short, it dealt with:
- methods to pay for the music without actually transfering money (like rendering some kind of a service for people who could in turn to pay for the music you wanted to buy) ,
- ways to find collectors who could swap with you - Russian music, postcards, stamps, bombshells etc. for CDs etc.
- good sources of indepentdent music,
- good places to get connected with like-minded folks (USENET newsgroups, mailing lists and a (then) new but promising media like *forums* *grin*)
- price differences among US and European online stores,
- misc. issues re large online stores vs one-man-operation mailorders,
- and so on.

Funny thing is, it turns out that this series of articles remains to be in demand - people still have very little information and understanding of how one could get himself a CD from abroad of Russia. The reasons are (as I keep repeating over and over again) a) most of people in provincial Russian regions like mine still do not speak *sufficient* English and b) lack of Internet experience.

But recently I noticed one more thing which prevented me from setting up a “we’ll find and buy for you any CD in the world!” business - from time to time I sell CDs from my collection which CDs I do not longer need. And if previously (say, 5 years ago) I was able to easily sell almost everything from the list of CDs for sale, then when I tried to do that last time  (about a year ago) I sold NOT a single CD from my list.

“Hmm, what a hell?”-  I thought to myself…But the answer was easy - I always handled my sales via Internet, I was selling used CDs from my collection in local newsgroups and local forums, that is SOLELY ONLINE - I never brought it to any kind of a swap meet (well, at least not in last 10-12 years I think…). And Internet savvy people turned out to migrate towards downloadable music - people do not want to buy CDs when they can download (or exchange) mp3s.

So I canceled my attempts to sell my hard earned indie CDs and just kept it for myself - and so I kept for myself an idea to start a “we’ll find and buy for you any CD in the world!” business - because I thought “heck, now that Internet is here, anybody can locate and buy for himself/herself ANYTHING nowadays”.

But it never came to my mind that “anybody” in my assumptions is rather “anybody who can speak/understand English more-less OK and knows a thing or two about Internet”. It’s not that much restricted of course - there are few Russian online shops you can order lots of foreign music from, but - as it turned out - these are rather limited in choice.

Anyways, one day I dropped by a friend of mine for a couple of beer. He owns an OFFLINE, that is real life, music store, and after 5th beer (err…did I say I was in for merely a couple?…) he offered me a partnership in a new (music related) business. He said: …

Continued in Part II

Filed under: Success stories - Offline meets Online