The Insanely Great Songs Apple Won't Let You Hear 341
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?"
Re:Devil's in the Contracts (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
YMCK! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Devil's in the Contracts (Score:3, Interesting)
Can I get the "domestic" price by switching to the iTunes Japan site?
Are the bits cheaper that way?
Well, of course not, since everything costs the same on iTunes. But I bet the labels would prefer it this way. This may be why those "import" tunes are just unavailable on the US store instead.
Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Beyond Music (Score:4, Interesting)
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:
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.
Re:Nothing new... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing (Score:1, Interesting)
I Remember going to their first(or nearly) shop, over a shoe shop in London's Oxford St.
Their Name
Virgin.
Apple are in a great position to widen the distribution of bands that are unknown outside their home area. This has been done many times before in the Music Biz.
Radio Caroline played West Coast US track long before the BBC.
The Old Grey Whistle Test showed bands playing live long before they became mainstream.
So PLEASE Apple, open up your music catalogues properly to a worldwide Audience. The Artists will appreciate it even if some of the music Companies might not. But thede Dodo's can't see beyong then of the fat cigar they are smoking to see the benefits of such a move. Its more $,£,Yen, Euros or whatever moving through your bank accounts. What is wrong with that?
Re:Nothing new... (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Licensing, licensing, licensing (Score:2, Interesting)
How can this be? I thought that the CSS license required the players to obey the regional restrictions.
Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing (Score:4, Interesting)
All the marketing, none of the support, and no overhead.
But if the pirates actually create a following, you can then offer media via existing channels, and make a buck.
Doesn't really bother me much, but makes me curious about their business sense.
Don't market in a place where a market does not exist. Wait for a market to apear, then take advantage of it. Nothing could be more brilliant.
Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing (Score:2, Interesting)
For instance, I was just yesterday digging in Beatport for an Armin Van Buuren track that was released on Nebula. They had exactly what I wanted but wouldn't sell it to me due to region.
I figured I had two options: steal it from somewhere or buy the physical record from a store in the states. I bought the record and, as it was on a different label (but still imported), both Beatport and Nebula lost money on that one.
It's due to restrictions like this that, while digital distribution is growing, the market for physical media (even vinyl records, in this particular case) is going to be around for at least a little while longer.
Re:MP3 is in the link (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe iTunes doesn't sell them is they sometimes are posted for free after the copyright expired unlike in the US where the extension act will make it sure I will expire first.
Some songs are only on iTunes - and then removed (Score:4, Interesting)
For over 2 years I had exactly 4 songs in my iTunes shopping cart... songs that I really liked, but I couldn't bring myself to hand over my credit card for the DRM inhibited music. I usually buy CDs.
So, for Christmas I received a couple of iTunes gift cards. I figured, what the heck... I'll buy the songs now and attempt to find something to strip the DRM.
And then the catch hit me. The songs, while still in my shopping cart and still had playable samples were "no longer for sale in the iTunes US store". The songs and the albumn that they made up were no longer listed in the store by any means of searching.
Here's the real kicker that pissed me off. These songs were only ever sold through the iTunes store. No physical store sales, no other online music stores, and I was never able to find them on any p2p services.
Hopefully I'll now be able to purchase them. This is another perfect example of why DRM is a bad bad thing. If the company holding the keys to the DRM infected information decides to revoke them, the content can be completely lost to society.
Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing (Score:4, Interesting)
What they need is a separate "local top rated" in addition to the "[absolute] top rated."
Re:so you're a fan of emminent domain? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think about copyright as being executed for the benefit of the culture, then artistic works don't really EVER intrisically belong to the creator (or copyright owner) - they belong to the culture that created them. Extending this idea, if a copyright owner decides to actually distribute their work, they're giving the people their due payment in exchange for the monopoly on distribution. It doesn't seem to make sense to then turn around and say "Well, I'll go ahead and repay YOU people, but NOT you guys over there!" because aren't we all supposed to uphold the same copyright?
Doesn't it then seem backwards for a region to uphold a copyright... on a product from which they receive no benefit? From that line of reasoning it seems that the only time a copyright owner should be able to do this is if they do not distribute the item to anyone.. anywhere.
This isn't a simple question. But it's definitely an interesting one.
Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Copyright (Score:3, Interesting)
I say this as someone who makes a living as a writer.
Piracy, the better choice (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing (Score:4, Interesting)