Slashdot Mirror
Exchange Rates Play With Online Music Prices
EconolineCrush writes "Those looking to purchase songs online may find that the price of music downloads varies quite a bit from country to country. Most vendors seem to be favoring 0.99/track pricing schemes, but $0.99CDN is worth quite a bit less than 0.99 British Pounds. When indexed to the US dollar, Canadians using Puretracks are getting a bargain with tracks costing only $0.76US, while UK residents using Coke's new music store are getting ripped off at nearly $1.80US per song. iTunes and Wal Mart sit between the two, with tracks selling for $0.99 and $0.88, respectively."
While CD-prices differ widely in comparison - at 1996 exchange rates, a normal CD cost
below US-$ 16.00 in the USA
US-$ 14.00 in Canada
US-$ 25.00 in Japan
US-$ 23.00 in Germany
US-$ 24.00 in the UK
Source
Note, the data is indeed eight years old. (jeeze, was 1996 that long ago?) Pardon the US bias, but this still seems to reflect what I understand are current retail prices.
--H
Russia's entry into online music: 1000 tracks, $14.95 per month OR a penny per megabit. Feels slimy but generally agreed to be legit.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Sure the exchange rate might give Canadians a bit of a deal but the extra 'fees' on blank media we pay makes it so we pay twice or three times for the music. Recently there have been $25 fees added to ipods and the ilk but downloading was also decided to be legal in Canada but uploading is not. CD-R's went up in price a couple times as well with the money going to the recording industry. Who would be silly enough to pay to download in Canada when the Canadian RIAA already has us paying since everyone already downloads for free according to them.
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
The _current_ exchange rates and the _theoretical_ exchange rates are quite different. The current exchange rates are either determined in financial markets or by governments, according to the conditions of the international payment balance.
The theoretical exchange rate is commonly called a PPP (power of purchase parity) exchange rate, and is evaluated by comparing the cost of simmilar baskets of products in different countries.
This can be tricky, as seldom the very same product exists all over the world - and if it does, the costs involved can be very different because of relative prices. "The Economist" often publishes the Big Mac Index, which attempts to estimate the theoretical (PPP) exchange rate comparing the prices of Big Macs all over the world - since it's a product that's pretty much the same everywhere and involves the same costs.
When current exchange rates are unbalanced, there's a strong effect over the importation/exportation ratio. In Brazil, during the mid-90's, US$ 1 was approximately R$ 1, which was totally insane in PPP terms. It was a time during which everyone bought imported goods insanely, and travelled a lot abroad - while people coming to Brazil, specially from other latin american countries, could barely afford a can of coke. That happened because the government wanted to control inflation - and it pretty much worked. But after a while, it lead to a major financial crisis, because there weren't any dollars to pay the importation - exportation balance, and they had to let the dollar rate fluctuate in the financial markets.
If one was to do a very extensive PPP research that took into comparison prices like this, perhaps some of these distortions will be elliminated. But then again, there's the "just under 1 buck" factor. In any case, this should serve as a big caveat when comparing cost of living in different countries.
At least for the Itunes Music Store, you have the option to buy the whole album for one price, usually 9.99, but i've seen them upto $16.99.
you're also charged about $20 and up for audiobooks, which are hours and hours long.
Feels slimy but generally agreed to be legit.
What do you mean by legit? Do you mean, they won't steal our credit card numbers (p.s. AmerExpress & Discover allow for 1 time use only credit card numbers), or do you mean that this sale of music is 100% legal in russian and there is nothing the RIAA can do about this (until they pay someone off)?
From their website under "legal":
"All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3I-03-79 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting. Users are held liable for the use and distribution of the MediaServices site information materials according to local legislation."
I think he's talking about the ridiculous proposition of paying for distorted, crippled music - paying, please observe, at the current rate for pristine CD-quality music on CD, yet lacking the CD itself, and the attendant artwork, lyrics, etc. that one would generally receive with purchase of the original CD.
I pity those who pay for WMA-garbled music and think they're getting a deal. I pity them further if they live in Canada, where downloading music for free is still legal.
Here's how I see it: if you like the music enough, and care about quality enough, you'll get the CD. If you like the music and don't particularly care about quality, then you can either pay for it and download from the WMA-vendors (rather dumb, IMHO) or P2P it.
Here in Canada we pay the royalties up front when we buy recordable media or portable music players. Downloading copyrighted content was ruled to be completely legal. As somebody who doesn't download much music, I've overpaid royalties on hundreds of CD-R's that I've used for my personal data - I've paid and received nothing at all in exchange.
Your American recording industry association is the reason that Canadians pay an extra 29% for recordable media. Legally, that's about forty steps closer to theft than any amount of copyright infringement could ever be.
Effectively these services operate like radio stations, and pay over a certain amount, either per track downloaded, or a flat fee negotiated, to these organisations. The general consensus is that they are legal in their home countries (and for Weblisten, presumably in all of the EU). I believe that Weblisten has been sued by the Spanish RIAA-equivalent but has prevailed. Weblisten has been around for 6 years, and allofmp3.com for 2 years, so one would expect that they would be gone by now if they were not legit.
You can find a good third-party review here - he also received a confirmation email from the Russian copyright organisation confirming allofmp3.com's legitimacy.
I've been signed up to allofmp3.com for a while and had no problems with my credit card, although I've always used a 'one use' number. Customer support is quick and efficient; they've responded within minutes to my queries. There doesn't seem to be any recurring billing either, you just sign up for a fixed term.
They allow online encoding into MP3/AAC/WMA/OGG/MPC but this is taking quite a while at the moment (in the queue for several days rather than only minutes) - presumably due to this mention on Slashdot. Your order is transcoded from 384k mp3 files rather than the uncompressed originals. This hasn't bothered me, but audiophiles might take issue.