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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."
..and with a global economy, one can only assume it's a matter of time before the formation of some semblance of world government.
Allofmp3.com, in Russia, at a penny a MB will get you a whole album for under a buck. And it's easier enough than filesharing to make paying worthwhile. (Legal, too, if you're the type to let laws decide your actions.) Why the hell would I pay 99 cents a song?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The economist just added a Starbuck's tall latte index (a purchasing-power parity test) similar to their Big Mac Index. How long will it be until they add an "mp3 index"?
Both the tall latte index and the Big Mac index show that the Canadian dollar is undervalued compared to the US dollar (which means that we get things cheaper here!). Sweet.
The Inquirer has many articles about how the British and others routinely get shafted due to companies using exchange rates to their own advantage.
Now I have to question. Is this legal in north america? Now I can see it being legal for them to sell the songs for a penny a meg do to some strange deal. But should the RIAA come kicking down my door, would purchasing every song I have from them count in a court of law? If it does I'd probably be willing to drop the $100 and legally own my music collection.
Thanks! I signed up for this.
$5 for 500 MB. Not bad at all.
Hope they don't fraud my card.
Well you can download a tank of gas? You see all of these other examples work becouse the shipping costs out way any possible advantage of pricing. That is to say even if you save 3dollars a gallon buying in the US, shipping just one tank of gas cost you more then if you just pay the overcharge in europe. Also most of the overcharge is due to taxes, so if you import the customs agent is going to ask for his tax money. Now the net doesnt really have customes agent. So people in .UK could just buy albums in The US site and download the content directly paying the US price. Cost of distribution is nill on the net, while in meat space it keeps you in line. Similarly we in the US should just use the .CA music as its cheaper then ours. I think the true solution is a single global monetary system. All of these exchange rates just play on old world devliery systems, in a information age they are a relic. To combat this system lets just setup a company in what ever country has the cheapest music, use it to proxy all purchases no matter where the end user lives, thus everyone gets the same lowest price. Sooner (rather then later) the content providers and merchants will figure out they need a single price for everyone in this single information system.
I think it should be pointed out that in Canada it is legal for someone to download music even if the source does not have the rights to distribute it. The person distributing is probably breaking the law though.
This is probably why Puretracks advertising concentrates on how they don't have spyware, porn, or viruses that often comes along with P2P software.
how do they handle CDs with lots of "filler" (like 30 s) or even short tracks (~2.5 m)? The new Best of Guided By Voices CD is one cd with 33 tracks on it. Does that mean its $33 purchased electronically?
How about making copyright reform a central issue in the upcoming election?
Very likely most politicians don't know if the DMCA is fit to eat, feel Disney and the RIAA are important campaign contributors whose requests should be given priority, and music downloaders are simple thieves who deserve every bit of punishment they get.
You can change that. But it's going to take some work. There are enough people sharing music in America - more people than voted for George Bush - that if you get off your collective asses and get politically active, you can get laws passed to get the RIAA off your back.
In Change the Law, I explain that copyright is not a Constitutional right, like free speech. Instead copyright is allowed (but not required) to serve a useful purpose, a purpose which I feel has long since outlived its usefulness.
I suggest steps you can take to bring about copyright reform, ranging from speaking out to practicing civil disobedience.
One thing I'd like you all to do today is to write your elected representatives to ask their opinion of the current state of copyright law given its widespread abuse by organizations like the RIAA and MPAA, and to urge them to work towards copyright reform. Let them know your vote will depend on a positive response.
When you're done writing that letter, write to the other candidates for each office in the upcoming elections, to ask them the same question.
Sixty million American peer-to-peer file traders have the potential to raise a lot of Hell with the politicians. I want every candidate to be peppered with questions about copyright reform at every campaign stop and in every press interview. I want the repeal of the DMCA to be discussed in the Presidential debates.
People marched in protest when Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested. Dmitry is free now - but the law under which he was jailed is still on the books.
If you agree with me that something needs to be done about copyright, I need your help.
Thank you for your attention.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Ack, due to Russian music laws, people using www.allofmp3.com in Russia can pay 1 cent per megabyte of mp3 or ogg or whatever, legally. However, once you download any of that into your American computer, its illegal since the RIAA isn't getting its "proper" share of the money.
the only reason that this matters is because of the non physical nature of the product. its not as easy to buy a cd from another country and have it shipped to yours and still save some money. but its no harder to purchase a music file from another country and download it.
does this mean that we will soon see a dvd type drm that will restrict what region you can play a file in?
~Tommy Boomfiger http://www.gotapex.com/forums
Excuse my skepticism, but I don't believe for a minute that WalMart is selling at a loss. The bandwidth certainly does not cost $0.88 and pretty much everything else is in imaginary costs that can be adjusted to any value between zero and infinity.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Did the person who posted this article know what they were even talking about? This isn't news... as the parent said it's "obvious". But really the whole story is mistitled and makes no sense really. Exchange rates cannot play with the price of music, that's not possible. If you are getting charged $.99 a song it doesn't matter where in the world you are you're going to pay the equivilent of $.99 a song in whatever currency you use. Only when a company sets different prices for different countries do discrepencies in price arise. It has absolutely nothing to do with exchange rates. Sure if you charge x.99 where x is any currency symbol, then you are going to have fluctuations in price from country to country, but what company actually does that? None that I have seen. This isn't news, it's nothing noteworthy at all.
Actually it would mean you're paying more per song then we are.
.99USD, About 24% more.
0.99 EUR = 1.225 USD
So you guys are paying slighlty more then our
I know the article is on exchange rates, but there is a site doing (or claiming to do) dynamic pricing based on demand.
.10 / track promotion.
.10 (albeit almost all songs are in crippled WMA format with limited burning capabilities). News.com.com story here.
www.musicrebellion.com
Obligatory disclaimer: I have no connection to musicrebellion.com. I just bought a dozen albums from them during their
The basic idea is that popular songs will rise in price, while less popular songs will decrease in price. To start things off they had a promotion where all tracks were
The thing that bugged me about Music Rebellion is that after the promotion ended everything immediately jumped to 90-odd cents.
I disagree strongly with that, as they have now given me little incentive to use them over iTunes. I'm willing to give them my business for some of the obscure Christian music I listen to if it's dynamically priced at 20-35 cents per track. Otherwise I'll save the WMA hassle and go iTunes. Unfortunately, the news.com article listed a floor of 50-75 cents per song (citing wholesale cost).
What I did like about them is that their customer service was responsive (some licenses didn't download correctly), and their selection was comparable to Apple's. They also seem to have some indie music promotion.
However, iTunes is so well designed (not relying on MSIE for downloads or WMP for burning) that I haven't had to use their customer service.
- Neil Wehneman
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
Care to backup that information of Apple losing money on the iPod and or the iTunes service?
This claim comes directly from a Jobs quote... From The Register, a quote of him saying: "We would like to break even/make a little bit of money but it's not a money maker".
For a more detailed breakdown, CDFreaks claims the recording industry gets a raw 65% cut (of which, despite a total lack of promotional or manufacturing costs, the artists only get 10% of that, so 6.5%). That leaves Apple with roughly 35 cents per song... Does the bandwidth, staff, and long-term equipment amortization cost that much per song? I doubt it, but we can safely say Apple doesn't really make killing at it.
Only that there is no price discrimination for DVD's. In Malaysia we have to pay for real DVD's with inflated prices that are comparable to US prices after factoring in the exchange rate. And they wonder why Asians pirate.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Anyone tried musicrebellion.com? Most songs are only 10 cents and the price goes up with demand. I think that is a neat idea, making popular music slightly costlier than niche music. Why should there be a flat rate?
All your favorite sites in one place!
That's a good point. We already pay the RI-eh-eh to legally download our music, so why would we pay extra money to someone like Puretracks?
Puretracks must be there to undercut the global market, or for Canadian schmuks who believe in a capitalist free market so much that they want to pay $US0.76 per track anyway.
Meanwhile, the rest of us legalized pirates (dirty commies) will buy CD-Rs and iPods and watch our money go to Martingrad to pump up a centrally planned slush fund which will help us achieve our 5-year plans.
(FTR, I don't believe in downloading music without compensating artists (record labels can whither and die in this info age for all I care) and I don't believe in undercutting the free-market with a inherently doomed centralized wealth redistribution system and think our country totally sucks in this regard.)
Why not use a Canadian proxy server that will let you download music from puretracks.com. There are lots of free, public proxy servers with Canadian ip addresses.
I'm not testing the theory, but from what my non-law trained mind figures, it's similar to buying a CD in Russia and bringing it back to the USA. But honestly, I don't know if the USA honors the Russian laws. I mean, I'm in the USA when I do the download, the law might not cover me. I think this is a fine time to remember "caveat emptor" or "buyer beware."
No.
I'm talking about getting music for free from P2P apps. US citizens continually justify their copyright infringement by playing games with semantics and generally side-stepping the question. Even with legalized music sharing I'd still want to compensate an artist for their work if I actually didn't get tired of the music.
I do agree that WMA pretty much destroys music files and that any service that tries to sell me a DRM product just won't fly with me. I think in a year or so there will be a service that really understands the desire for legal, high quality (greater than 192kbps) MP3s/Oggs. I also think that someone could launch a service solely devoted to broadening musical horizons and do well while staying legal. But since we've grown accustomed to free, everything else looks expensive by comparison. Give it some time.
The credit card processor is pretty reputable. I signed up to this service and spent hours doing the research (they didn't accept PayPal then). Seems this processor has been involved in helping Russian authorities bust mafia rings, scammers, and all sorts of stuff. The bank seems to check out too.
:-)
Double check with your credit card company over their policies on Internet fraud if worried, I did. Haven't had any fraudulent charges appear on my card (yet).. touch wood. Will notify all and sundry if I do though!!
Bit pissed someone decided to let Slashdot know all about it though.. damn, hope it doesn't ruin the site for us early birds
Why not create an online currency and tie it to something like paypal? You pay 0.99 'nets (or whatever) for the song which is billed to your account...then you pay your account at the end of the month in your own currency.
They don't need to region code as long as they maintain seperate stores for each country they can set the prices however they want. No doubt iTunes Europe will be selling tracks for 0.99GBP when it launches with no explanation of why we are paying more than a third more per track. Oh yeah its because 99 is a nice number, well that makes it all ok then.
I feel justified because P2P isn't about free music for me, it's a SAMPLE service.
:p)from a store and tossing my burnt copy because there was a reason that I had the urge to burn them and carry them with me in the first place and that reason was that they were great albums.
I've burnt quite a few CDS out a hi quality mp3 that match, track for track, the order and song list of the album. Of 3 albums that I've burnt that way, I ended up buying 3 of them (what a record!
In fact, I could begin to list off whole bands that I own CDs of that I wouldn't even have KNOWN about if it wasn't for p2p services.
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
While it may seem to someone in America that the UK may be overpaying for their online music, it probably doesn't seem that way to someone actually in the UK.
;-)
What, you think we can't do basic maths?
I've seen the price disparity mentioned in BBC news articles about online music services - 99c in the US, 99p in the UK, with a current exchange rate of around 1.7USD/GBP. Don't worry, some of us at least know that we're being ripped off. Sure, it's cheaper than buying a CD, but it should be. With a music download, you're not getting a physical backup of the music (you have to create your own), and you don't get a case with a nice inlay, notes, etc.
Just because something is cheaper, doesn't mean it's cheap enough, especially if it's available more cheaply elsewhere, with only artificial limits preventing us from purchasing from that source instead. (ie there's no technological reason why I can't buy music from an online retailer in the US, the data can flow easily enough if they'd only let it)
It's official. Most of you are morons.