The Insanely Great Songs Apple Won't Let You Hear

FunkeyMonk writes "Slate.com has an article by Paul Collins explaining that the iTunes music store has thousands of tracks that you can't buy in the U.S. From the article: 'The iTunes Music Store has a secret hiding in plain sight: Log out of your home account in the page's upper-right corner, switch the country setting at the bottom of the page to Japan, and you're dropped down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of great Japanese bands that you've never even heard of. And they're nowhere to be found on iTunes U.S.' The article goes on to mention a few workarounds if you want to purchase foreign tunes. But this brings up a good point — why shouldn't iTunes be the great mythical omniscient music repository where all the world's music is available instantly? Is this simply a marketing decision?"

Licensing, licensing, licensing

[barcarolle (581253)]

This is just the way the music business works. Apple can't change the fact that labels only license to certain territories. Just like you can go into a music store in Japan and buy thousands of CDs you can't buy elsewhere, Apple's iStore is contractually bound to operate the same way.

Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing

[hkgroove (791170)]

This is exactly it and it drives me insane, especially with some of the independent (dance) labels. To make it even better, it's not even by label, but by the track. Artist A might sell a track to two different labels - one for the EU and the UK and another label for the US.

What makes it even more retarded is that the remix / version you want is always on the other label which you're not allowed to buy.

Most of the other stores are smarter, unfortunately, and you just can't go and change your location. So, you get to have fun finding a proxy that truly is in the territory from where you want to pretend to be.

Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's god's way of punishing you for liking dance 'music'.

Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing

[Nogami_Saeko (466595)]

I suppose the bigger question is "why do Japanese labels want people to pirate their music?". Because if you don't offer people a legit way of downloading tracks, then people gravitate to the alternatives.

Doesn't really bother me much, but makes me curious about their business sense.

As an aside, Apple/iTunes/publishers also do the same thing with video content that's available to US customers only, and not to people from other geographic regions. The reason? Who knows, but I do know that it's costing them money from people like me that would prefer to purchase it easily rather than using alternatives...

Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

True, of course, but iTMS really highlights the problem. Back when the way of selling music was to press it to a record (or other physical medium) and sell it in a shop, it made sense to have different distribution deals for different countries. Company A might have access to retail channels in the USA, while company B might have access to retail channels in the UK. Giving either a worldwide licensing deal would be a problem, since neither would be able to exploit it. Giving both a worldwide deal might cause them to step on each other's toes in some areas, which would be bad for business.

Amazon started to change the rules. They had almost the same store in a large number of countries. You could even get them to ship products to you from their stores in another country using the same account. They were not bound by the distribution contracts, since they were buying from the authorised distributor and selling them elsewhere.

The movie industry tried to 'fix' this, rather than embracing it, by introducing region codes. Now, the DVD you bought from the USA wouldn't play on your player (although most stand-alone DVD players sold in the UK are now region-free, laptop drives are often not, which is irritating).

A bigger problem than music and film, however, is TV shows. These are typically broadcast in one country up to a year before they are syndicated elsewhere. There is no option to buy them legally through any channel[1], but you can download them from the Internet within a few hours of their original release. The movie industry woke up to this and started launching things at the same time worldwide, but the music and TV industries are still stuck in the regional distribution model.

iTMS simply serves to highlight the fact that entire industries are clinging to an obsolete business model. Now that worldwide distribution is a reality, they are still trying to enforce regional supply chains.

[1] This, to my mind, means that they should not be protected by copyright. If you intentionally exclude a region, then it is not in the best interests of that region to grant you a monopoly on distribution.

Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing

[CastrTroy (595695)]

I think the other reason they don't let people buy tracks from other countries is because the pricing is different. In Canada a song costs $CDN 0.99. However in the US, the tracks cost $US 0.99. So you could buy a track for about $US 0.85 if the Americans were allowed to buy tracks in Canada. I'm not sure what the prices are in the UK. If they are GBP 0.99 then I don't think anybody would be shopping there if they had the ability to go to the Canadian store and buy tracks there.

Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing

[zentec (204030)]

If you do that, make sure you do it with gift cards and not a credit card. Your $.99 Canadian iTunes purchase will result in a $3.00 foreign currency exchange fee on your credit card. Plus, the $.99 for the song.

Nothing new...

[sugapablo (600023)]

Back in the 60's, British and US releases had different songs on them.

British had "With the Beatles" while an album with slightly different tracks called "Meet the Beatles" came out in the US.

The British version of "Are You Experienced?" by Hendrix had additional songs, such as "Red House" which the record company felt would go over better in Britain than the US, even though it was a straight blues track and blues was born in the US. *shrugs*

So while in the age of the internet, this seems silly, it's nothing new.

Re:Nothing new...

[hackstraw (262471)]

Actually I remember my older sisters having boxes of 45 rpm singles. It wasn't until cassettes and 8-track became predominate in the early 70's that you almost had to buy the whole collection of songs that comprised an album.

Singles were a marketed item until the advent of the CD. Now that we have digital formats, the record labels simply don't want to sell singles at all. They even fought Apple, the leader in MP3 player sales, to "let" them sell MP3 singles, and then would only let them do it at a high price with DRM. Buying a Beatles single is still either impossible or very limited.

An interesting piece of trivia here. Albums, with respect to music, mean a collection (like a photo album). Back "in the day" an album was a few 78 RPM discs bundled together. It wasn't until the advent of the 12" LP (long play) 33.3 RPM discs that an album was able to fit on one consumer playable media. That is why albums, records, vinyl, etc are synonymous.

Re:Nothing new...

[Teddy Beartuzzi (727169)]

One of my favourite stories...

Three generations are gathered together at a reunion. The youngest is preparing dinner, a fine potroast. She takes the roast, dutifully cuts off each end of the roast as taught years ago by her mom, and puts it in the pan. She asks her mother "Mom, I never really understood that part, why do we always cut off the ends of the roast? It's perfectly good meat we're just throwing away."

And the mother responds, "I don't know really, I always do it because that's the way Grandma taught *me*". So they decide to go out into the living room, and ask Grandma. And she replies... "I used to cut the ends off so the damn roast so it would fit inside the pan, you idiots".

It is still the same old behaviour, but the physical constraints that legitimized that behaviour are now gone, and the behaviour should change accordingly. ;)

I see this all the time in various ways. Online stores, software, you name it, various industries or designs clinging to behaviours that used to have physical limitations still doing things the same old way, even though they no longer have to.

My wife and I just raise our eyebrows and whisper "potroast" to each other.

Devil's in the Contracts

[necro81 (917438)]

One possible reason why that insanely great band from Japan (love the hyperbole, by the way) can't have its songs show up in the U.S. version of iTMS is that the label that produced the music hasn't licensed Apple to sell it in the U.S. I'm not sure why that would be, but there are all kinds of idiotic details in music contracts. There may also be weird export and tariff issues at stake - different country, different laws. Ever notice that the import version of a CD on amazon tends to be 2x-3x more expensive than the domestic release, if you can even find it?

Re:Devil's in the Contracts

[russ1337 (938915)]

>>>"Possibly because the label itself doesn't have rights to distribute the material in the US. There's often different publishers for different regions on the same medium."

OR, think of the outrage from the industry if a Japanese track made #1 on the US charts.

Re:Japanese track made #1 on the US charts

[Technician (215283)]

It has already happeded.

http://www.maddmansrealm.com/sukiyaki/ [maddmansrealm.com]

"His biggest hit, Ue o Muite Aruko (I Look Up When I Walk; "Sukiyaki" in the West), was released in Japan in 1961. After its release in the U.S. in 1963, the song's earnestness and melodic beauty proved irresistible despite its incomprehensible lyrics. Against all odds, on June 15, 1963, the song ousted Leslie Gore's "It's My Party" to become the No. 1 popular song in the U.S."

Japan has lots of great music. While I was there I bought a few albums. Some I could not even tell you who the artist is or the name of the album because there is not any english printing on it. The record stores would frequently play albums and display the album playing. This is how I found and bought some great music.

It's probably a legal decision.

[foxtrot (14140)]

Apple has contracts with various record houses that allow Apple to sell their music.

Sadly, while the Internet is world-wide and country borders are merely speedbumps, the legal world hasn't figured that one out yet...

So their deals with Japanese record houses probably only allow Apple to sell their music in Japan.

Seems short-sighted to me. If you're making a deal with the guys who sell 80% of the online music sold, why not let them sell to as many people as possible instead of holding back rights? You get a cut on each...

For an iTunes J-Pop/J-Rock fix

[realinvalidname (529939)]

JList/JBox [jbox.com] has been selling Japanese iTunes [jbox.com] cards for some time, and frequently advertise them in their ads in magazines like NewType USA. Right next to the hentai/bishoujo games and Domo-kun plushies.

Uh, it's the Record Companies

[MacBoy (30701)]

I mean come on! Do you really think it has anything to do with Apple itself not letting you hear the song? Oh yes, Apple engages in musical censorship. It's the record companies, people. If a band doesn't have a record distribution deal in the US, then guess what! you can't buy their music on iTunes either.

It's about copyright ending at the border

[dschuetz (10924)]

why shouldn't iTunes be the great mythical omniscient music repository where all the world's music is available instantly? Is this simply a marketing decision?

It *should* be a simple, global, find-it-and-buy-it repository. Unfortunately, the way that copyright has been worked, the right to sell a particular work (music, movie, tv show) only extends to a country's borders. If you want to sell that work in another nation, you have to somehow acquire the rights to sell there as well.

This used to be a real problem trying to buy import albums and CDs. If a particular overseas-only album had a local rights-owner who didn't have the title in print, that rights-owner could prevent you from importing the CD for purchase. (Naturally, they could also prevent you from importing if they *did* have it in print, but generally then you wouldn't want the import in the first place.) This didn't always happen in practice, but it did make things more difficult at times.

Today, they try to restrict trans-national media purchases via things like region coding.

Honestly, I think this is another of the ridiculously outdated aspects of copyright law that really needs to change. In my mind, if I purchase a legally-produced copy of a CD or DVD (or iTunes download), then somehow, somewhere, somewhen the artist was compensated for that purchase. Maybe not directly, and maybe not for that exact purchase, but at some point the artist's rights to sell the track were transfered to someone else who got money from me. It shouldn't matter if I'm buying a German pressed CD while visiting in Japan and holding a US passport. As long as the German CD was produced with the approval (or delegated approval) of the original artist/rights-holders, then it should be treated as legitimate and proper.

Of course, if you've got a situation where some country is permitting the sale of tracks for which the original artists have *not* delegated their rights to whomever made the [cd, dvd, file], then that shouldn't be permitted. Certainly, this isn't what's happening in Japan, but it is sort of what happened with AllOfMP3 (or so I understand -- I haven't followed that too closely).

I believe this is also why it's taken so long for new iTunes stores to open in new countries. It's not just a matter of arranging the financial-side of things for handling payments, currency conversions, etc., or even of getting servers and such set up for faster local access, but I bet a whole lot of it is securing the appropriate approvals from whomever "owns" the publishing rights for each track in that country.

No, it's a label decision.

[l-ascorbic (200822)]

It's not a big scary conspiracy. They need to be granted rights for each territory by the labels. They evidently don't have US licences for all the japanese stuff. But if you prefer you can pretend that the government is stopping Apple corrupt the nation's youth with cheesy J-pop.

Another legal way to buy Japanese music

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve (949321)]

I know of another legal way to buy Japanese music. You can buy Japanese CDs in an English web page at
http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/ [cdjapan.co.jp]
I have no financial interest in this company. I am merely an occasional customer. Of course, if you are under, say, 25 years old, the idea of actually buying a CD will be anathema to you as you'll have to wait for it to arrive by mail and you'd rather slit your emo wrists than do anything that doesn't lead to instant gratification. And if you want to just buy individual tracks, this isn't the answer you were looking for either. However, if you are over 30 years old and not afflicted with ADD, this might be an option for you should want to purchase that CD that is only available in Japan. Sometimes Japanese CDs come with bonus tracks not released in other markets (usually this means the US), so hardcore fans of various Western singers/groups might be interested in Japanese CDs for that reason too.

Jesus, keep this shit on Digg

[by Anonymous Coward]

Christ, how did this one make it through? I'd expect this kind of thing on digg, but Slashdot is usually a shade better about posting uninformed hyperbole. It's not Apple that won't let you hear these so called "insanely great songs" - it's the record companies in Japan. Apple is only authorized to sell those songs to residents of Japan. It's not big, bad Apple keeping the little guy down, or some vast racketeering conspiracy by the RIAA or anything like that. It's just standard protocol - different distribution agreements for different countries. If the record companies of Japan felt like there was money to be had in selling these songs across the pond, they'd negotiate that with Apple and you'd see these songs in the US-version of the iTMS. To act all indignant because you browsed the Japanese iTMS and were not allowed to use an American credit card/gift card is just absurd. Different countries have different factors (e.g., blank media tax) to consider in distribution that make articles like this seem so uninformed and naive that it's embarrassing.

Do the math...

[biglig2 (89374)]

A copy of Britney's Greatest Hits (as a random example) on the US itunes store is $8.91.
On the UK iTunes store it is $15.75 (i.e. £7.99)
On the Canadian store, $8.47
New Zealand, $12.61
etc. etc. etc.

On the Japanese store, by the way, they don't sell it at all. Guess they saw the video for "Hit me Baby" and figured "Like the schoolgirl outfit, but needs more tentacles. Or cowbell."

Beyond Music

[rueger (210566)]

The increasingly insular approach of North American media is something that goes beyond Japanese pop songs.

In the book business it has become near impossible to convince publishers to translate non-English authors, making access to some of the planet's finest writers nearly impossible.

Geist magazine [geist.com] out of Vancouver has had a couple of good articles looking at this phenomenon, one by Stephen Henighan [geist.com] in Issue 61, and by acclaimed writer Alberto Manguel in Issue 62.

Henigan's article opens:

Over dinner, I asked the Quebecoise writer Sylvie Desrosiers, the author of successful novels for both adults and younger readers, whether her books had been translated into English. "Non, pas en anglais," she said. "I've been translated into Spanish, Greek, Arabic . . ." She listed two or three other languages, then shook her head. "But not into English."

A few weeks after Desrosiers's visit, I was one of the hosts for the Ontario tour of the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. The Salvadoran edition of Moya's novel El Asco (1997)--the title is roughly translatable as Revulsion --ran through six printings in a year and earned Moya enough death threats that he moved to Germany. Now in his late forties, Moya is the best-known Salvadoran writer of his generation. His novels come out in Spanish-language editions in San Salvador, Mexico City and Barcelona; in France and Quebec he is considered a significant literary figure (he was a featured guest of the 2005 Salon du Livre in Montreal); his novels are also available in German and Italian. His work has not been translated into English.

Manguel's article this month puts the blame squarely on the publishing houses who are increasingly market driven to publish lowest common denominator works, rather than building a catalog that stands on literary merit.

North America lives in a cultural bubble defined by a narrow range of English language music, writing, and film. It would be a great exercise to see how iTunes handles music from Latino and Mexican artists, or in Canada from Quebec musicians.

I'll wager that both of those groups are also underrepresented despite the considerable popularity of their work.

Two Quick Points

[Paulrothrock (685079)]

First, this isn't "Apple" not letting you hear these things. It's the record companies and their licensing agreements. If you go into a record store in the US, do you see all these great Japanese artists? Hell no. Why? Isn't it just as easy to ship them over as it is to ship over US artists? It's not Apple limiting these things, it's the damned recording companies.

It's the same reason that TV shows on iTunes US aren't available on iTunes UK and vice versa. There are ancient licensing agreements (well, ancient in terms of the internet) between the media companies that Apple has to respect if you want any content on iTunes at all. Apple could have gone the eMusic route and filled the iTunes store with independent artists, but who would start doing that?

Finally, Apple's not preventing you from hearing these songs on your computer or your iPod. You're free to buy them on CDs and rip them into your computer. And you can even rip them in MP3 format with no DRM! Amazing!

It's natural for people to beat up on Apple because that's who's dealing with them when they don't get what they want. But that's just human nature. I used to work as a bus boy in a restuarant. I've seen people scream at waiters for the cooks screwing up their order. I've seen people yell at cashiers for something they bought there not working correctly. Most people are stupid. It's up to those of us who aren't to

That's the one thing that really annoys me

[kilodelta (843627)]

Quite often I'll hear a song on last.fm that I like and go on iTunes to buy it. Come to find out it's an iTunes UK offering and my account won't let me download it. This is the major problem with the music industry. Music is now international, not regional. The industry hasn't adapted yet.

Re:Isn't it the record labels doing it?

[KFW (3689)]

Exactly. Apple/iTunes is an easy target, but they're obliged by their contract. This is the same reason that iTunes was available in different countries at different times - it took a while to negotiate the contracts (even in the EU each country's music distributor had to be negotiated with seperately). Honestly, do you think Apple wants to turn away money? I don't believe iTunes is the only store with this issue. So while there are a lot of legitimate complaints about iTunes (esp. the DRM, which isn't entirely driven by the studios), this article was just a cheap shot at an easy target.
/K