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iTunes Europe Goes Live
Spad writes "The Register is reporting the launch of iTunes in the UK, France and Germany. "iTunes will carry 700,000 songs from the five major record labels and independents, and prices for the download service start at 79 pence or 99 euro cents per song." It's not ideal (99c is about 55p) but it's better pricing than expected. I for one will be signing up to use it."
Well it's launched but there's not much on there at the moment and there's an awful lot of "Partial albums" consiting of just one song. Hopefully they'll be adding more tracks over the coming weeks....
Just spend your money on allofmp3.com! You'll get at least 20x the amount of music for your money than on itunes. Also, allofmp3 pays artist, but doesn't pay the RIAA. You can download legally, without worrying that you're paying for legal battles against your fellow music downloaders.
How many Apple users are there in Europe anyway?
(UK-specific)
I've encountered very few, mainly in printing/advertising, etc. Apple in the US seem to have targetted education heavily; in the UK that niche was filled first (80s) by Acorn and Research machines, then latterly by PC-clones.
The only two Macs I've seen recently were:
However... iPods appear to be extremely popular. I'd guess they're the Windows-variety, though. (I suppose it's also possible that there aren't that many iPods - just a lot of kids with white headphones ;)
This is where the serious fun begins.
Screw that. Try allofmp3.com. I pay 1 to 2 cents per meg, don't have to deal with annoying DRM, and choose whether I want files in mp3, ogg, wma, aac, whatever, even lossless FLAC, and the bitrate I want. I haven't used filesharing since I found it.
RTFA and see that an EU store will be opening in the fall. Also, the U.S., while made up of many constituent states, has one unified copyright set by the federal government. Europe has many varying laws, from country to country, I'd imagine.
Apple also announced that the iTMStores would open all over the European Union in October.
e s. html
For instance, see:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jun/15itun
Europe has many varying laws, from country to country, I'd imagine.
That's broadly it - in theory there's a unified directive; in practice only two states had implemented it as of end 2002.
This is where the serious fun begins.
It's not ideal (99c is about 55p) but it's better pricing than expected. I for one will be signing up to use it.
I can't understand why anybody would want to support price gouging. Unless a swift and painful message is delivered to them NOW, the price will not get any cheaper. And in 20 years time we will have another investigation into why our prices are so high compared to other places which will again (like CDs) do nothing about it.
The difference is that there is one copyright authority governing the entire US, and there is one copyright authority for every country in the EU, so supposedly you have to negotiate 25 different deals for every EU member country. The EU is not a country, it's a trade union.
On the other hand, I'm curious about something: amazon can sell music cd's across europe, why can't apple sell music files across europe? Does amazon have some kind of special deal to allow them to sell copyrighted materials in every country? Or is the internet again being treated like the bastard stepdaughter of the copyright world?
If any of you follow financial news, companies are reporting additional gains from exchange rates, and some years report losses...
Prices are set in local markets based upon localized demand and competition (limited monopoly pricing power from brand, even in a relatively competitive market), etc.
Right now, it is cheaper for Germans to buy German cars sold in America and reimport them, because even with the cost of shipping the car from the states, the Euro is so strong on the dollar that it results in the importing the American made German car is cheaper.
Companies set prices (usually with local subsidiaries because of assinine international tax laws) in each country. Many companies will engage in "hedging" with the currency derivative market, because they aren't in the business of currency speculation (although if it should work out in the long run, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, then paying the commissions on those trades isn't economically intelligent, but it's important for hitting quarterly/annual numbers, joys of public accounting).
However, the price will be set in the European market based upon the prevailing price there. However, that is in part because of Apple's limited "monopoly" pricing power (note, this is NOT monopoly a la anti-trust, it's in a competitive market with highly similiar substitute goods, like CDs, pirated music, etc.), but only Apple sets the price for iTMS downloads.
One of the things that the Internet and digital transfers has the potential to do is destroy regionalized pricing, at least within the English (and then Spanish, etc.) speaking world. In that scenario, Apple could set prices in each store based upon local trends, but consumers could buy from whichever store TODAY's currency price makes most beneficial. That is great for consumers, but lousy for corporate profits (then they ALWAYS lose on the currency fluctuation, because the business goes to whatever is cheapest that day).
However, a Euro price that isn't identical to US pricing with TODAY'S rate of exchange makes sense. The Euro is up something like 30% on the Dollar in the past 12 months. If that trend reverses, and 1 $ = 1 E again, then a Euro price of 55 cents would devastate Apple. The Euro was established at a price level to make the nominal exchange of Euros to Dollars approx. 1:1, which would obviously fluctuate.
Consumers in general are more interested in pricing in their local currency then international pricing. Although the Internet has changed things SLIGHTLY, in general, most consumers don't engage in International trade, but rather buy from an organization that has imported the products for them. Hence Amazon has localized businesses, Apple set up local Apple AND now iTMS to price in the local currency. Cars are priced in each local market.
However, the free flow of information will reduce that ability over time, which is a good thing, but you shouldn't be shocked that it isn't instant.
Alex
Oops. Link for the above story
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Well, in common with about 50% of mac users, at least 1 of my machines isn't up to spec for OSX, I don't fancy taking a 15-25% performance hit, repurchasing half my favourite software and doing without the other half that hasn't being ported yet, and I don't want to learn a whole new OS when I already have one that I know very well and is practically 100% stable.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Check out Magnatune.com - no DRM, just music and 50% goes to the musicians.
amazon can sell music cd's across europe, why can't apple sell music files across europe?
I suspect the difference is that Amazon.com just ships around pre-made physical goods, whereas iTunes Music Store offers digital downloading. It's essentially a completely new form of commerce.
Apple needs to convince the labels that they want to offer their product through iTMS, hence the need to negotiate deals. Apple has also said the labels make the actual music files, not Apple. So again, Apple has to convince the labels to put effort into encoding their products for iTMS.
the problem isn't varying laws however.. rather varying companies/organizations/license_deals.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Oh, the same tired tale. You know, if you want to get the record companies to stop promoting shitty bands, maybe you should first get people to stop buying shitty albums. It is a tragedy that Britney Spears has sold ten times as many records as Tom Waits with a quarter of the talent...but them's the breaks.
I mean, it's not like independent labels don't exist, don't sign bands and don't release albums to the mass market INCLUDING over iTunes. In fact, iTunes has more independent labels than any other online music store. You don't think SONY Connect is gonna court Asian Man Records, do you?
I've actually been quite surprised by the number of GOOD artists who get above-the-fold promotion on iTunes. Even the ones who don't are displayed RIGHT NEXT to their corporate shilling brethern. And the selection beats the crap out of the most ecclectic brick & mortars I've seen. I mean, iTunes has the friggin' Kind Geedorah record. I had to literally threaten violence at my local Newbury Comics to get them to even ORDER that shit, and even then it cost me $20.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
To be fair, you can buy a new Mac for 550UKP
Join the Free Software Foundation
Well, from this article at the Reg (the one linked to in the article has been removed from their front page)...
The Euro prices will be maintained when Apple launches a pan-European store to cater for the continents other nations. Jobs promised it would open by "October", and will initially be offered only in English. Jobs offered no comment on the launch of Canadian or Japanese stores.
So it is probably a combination of having to bash out licencing issues with the companies, and logistical issues to do with roll-out, marketing, billing etc.
Either way, looks like they will get there in the end. Although it looks like you are screwed if you are Canadian.
Paul Leader
I just bought Franz Ferdinand last night from iTunes and I know they have the White Stripes. I think what you're seeing is the same thing as we saw in the US, it took a few months for the library to grow and become more inclusive.
So, I wouldn't say the independent labels are not signing up, they're there, it's just an issue of providing the same library we get in the US to you guys across the pond.
Yes, it's a complete rip-off.
Why would I buy a virtual CD for 7.99 when I can get the real thing for 8.99 including postage?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
they also said the talks with the indies had just begun. same thing happened in the USA. i think it was mostly because of the legal issues. they need the big labels onboard to make the store look valid. the indies were offered "the same deal as the majors" and can choose if they want to sign on. it might also have had a little to do with keeping it under wraps till it was really ready. with so many indies, it would have been easy for info to leak out and we know how Apple hates that.
I don't think most of the iTMS customers are being driven to the store by the RIAA's lawsuits. All along, there have been lots of people saying that they downloaded music from P2P because it was convenient, and they only did it illegally because there was no decent legal alternative.
Apple's business model is to make things even more convenient, allow people to be honest, and offer it at a price that's not much worse than free.
Sure, there are still plenty of people out there just downloading whatever they can find for nothing, just as there are people who shoplift in brick and mortar stores. But that doesn't mean there's no money to be made in selling stuff.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
iTMS France has mostly french artists from the little I've seen yet. The selection is already customized.
I think, at the end of the day, victory will go to whoever can court the most artists. Music stores are really pimping their exclusives, and obviously it'll be harder for Apple to grab exclusives on SONY artists now that Connect is live. But Apple is doing something most labels aren't -- it's courting the independent labels and targeting specific markets with their excellent Jazz, Classical and Audiobooks sections. As such, they have an impressive NUMBER of songs, as well as an impressive DISTRIBUTION of artists. I am more likely to find what I am looking for on iTunes than on any other music service.
However, iTunes does have a major problem, in that by allowing labels to control their songs on a song-by-song basis, a lot of labels have removed one track off an album just so you can't buy the whole thing for $9.99. Usually, this one track is a skit or something, but occasionally, they remove the #1 hit. Try finding Don McClean's "American Pie," for example. This is friggin' annoying...and a lot of other services (with, I'm sure, more slipshod toolsets) don't have this problem.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Credit cards come closest to an international standard for funds transfer, but few Europeans have them
I know of no one who does not have a credit card, with the possible exception of an old relative. I live in the UK. Is it different elsewhere in Europe?
Other than that, I agree strongly.
Reportedly, one out of every six iPods sold over the Christmas quarter last year was sold in the UK. Apparently they're every bit as popular in the UK as anywhere else.
Apple no longer makes Windows-specific iPods, incidentally. The earlier models were platform-specific, but the models made since April 28th of last year have all been officially Mac-Windows. I would indeed assume the overwhelming majority of those UK iPods are probably being used with Windows, of course.
Because, you can't rip your new CD's anyway! They are f*cked up to offer copy protection, that can easily be broken, but the loss is the bits that keep the error-correction, thus making the quality lower than any regular CD.
Breaking the CD copy protection is illegal by law, so even if you could use say a HIFI CD-player with optical digital out and a soundcard in your PC with optical digital in to do this, it would be illegal.
So this sums up to:
a - Yes, but with some scratches, you'll be lucky to hear anything...
b - Well, you can use anything besides a Computer, certain car stereo's and HIFI cd-players with advanced features(B&O dosen't play those scrap CD's)
c - Exactly 0 times, because it would be illegal to break the copy "protection"
d - No, not unless you break the law
e - Perhaps, I wouldn't know, they got some creative accounting people at the recordcompanies, how else whould they be able to convince governments to put special musical artist tax on Flash ram cards, and empty CD's?
f - The cover "art" has been in servere decline the last many years, today's standard I could do in photoshop in 2 hours
Thats why iTunes is such a great deal, because thats the ONLY way you can get new music to a transportable format legally. A CD is somewhat transportable, but I don't feel like bringing a suitcase with CD's every time I take the train/plane etc.
-H
....and as a bit of A Jazz fan, found the selections available quite good.
After a few clicks, I located some old Nina Simone stuff, that I've only seen on more expensive compilations.
One strange thing is that some of the albums are shown as "partial" on the UK Site, but "Full" on the US one? I have the ability to selct the US site, but haven't tried ordering from there?
Anyone know if that would work? It used to be that the iTunes Store Page wouldn't display at all,, but now it does, and I can select UK, France, Germany or the US sites - as has been noted previously, the prices are different, but 79 pence is less than originally mooted?
Personally, I don't think its too much per track - in the UK, everyone is used to "Rip-Off Britain" so 79 pence is cheap to us!
-- Seamus
Amazon has a different shop for every country.
You can't get anything delivered to a different country.
Not true. Amazon.co.uk sells to all countries in the EU. Amazon.com even sells music cd's to EU countries, but the price is prohibitively expensive.
Actually it is. RIAA is not a world wide organization (...of America will point you to this), it only has ANY relevance in the US, what gives them their 'legal' status is a Russian RIAA (you can read the legal international agreements from the 80's/90's, after USSR's fall, which do actually give them the right to represent western artists). So yes it is legal in Russia (else it would have been shut down THERE, no? - there are laws and even traces of civilization in other places than the US, as hard as that may be to believe).
RIAA only governs music in the US, if you buy the music elsewhere and then import it for personal use it's all ok as long as you acquired it legally (and you have, according to Russian law, which is what's relevant here).
That's probably because the United States of America is the only country in America that has the word America in its name. Besides, the term America as you would want us to use it is a grouping. It's all of the countries in North and South America. There is almost never a need to use the term America when speaking of North and South America. When's the last time you heard someone use the term Eurasia in a sentence outside of some geography or history class? Never, because Europe and Asia are so freaking different there's almost never a reason to group them togather in that manner. Same with America, it's almost never used in casual conversation to refer to North and South America becasue North and South America are so differnt from one another.
So, in short, when people say America they mean the United States of America and for a fairly practical reason. One, the United States of America is the only country in America to have America in it's title. Two, the term America is almost never used outside of school. That's the way it is, get over it.
If you Canadians hate it so much then why don't you guys change your name to the Canadian Provinces of America. Then you'd have a much more legitimate reason to bitch and moan.
but good luck getting a form or e-banking page in which you can enter an IBAN acct number - and if you, the bank, or the receiver screws up,
Well one of the biggest banks in the world, the Dutch ABN-Amro, does it. And it works like a charm. You just copy paste the IBAN number in the little insertfield write a comment, type the amount of money you want transfered *click* and your done. One day later the other guy has the money.
This really works well, and if you just copy paste the IBAN number it is very hard to fuck things up.
ABN Amro's operations differ from country to country. Besides, it's a lot harder to use IBAN transactions with Postbank (which has the largest number of accounts in The Netherlands) and outfits like SNS, ING, etc. (Rabobank does support it, but makes it easy to select a non-IBAN, non-free method, and, AFAIK will charge you if you make a mistake in someone's name for example).
Also, when you use a method like Credit Card, paypal, direct debit (there is NO pan-European direct debit!) etc. which are integrated into e-commerce software, your payment information is linked to the transaction, whereas if you pay manually, they have to figure out which payment belongs to which transaction. Minor differences in the amount transferred (you DID enter 14.29, NOT 14.30, right?), your initials etc. all offer new opportunities to fuck things up (this is a non-trivial problem called "reconciliation").
There are multi-country payment service providers (such as bibit but typically they don't cover all of the EU.
A Europe-wide IBAN-like scheme for direct debit would be a godsend at this time..
Or even better, some sort of use-your-regular-bank-account-as-a-"credit"-card scheme where you simply enter your IBAN, your bank gets your authorization via e-banking/phone/whatever, and the payment is cleared would be pretty much ideal.
Then, you only have to worry about all those different mail/parcel services and all those different laws, customs and tax offices, etc.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Moreover, you would be suprised at how clear the 128kbps AAC is. Just for the sake of testing, I own a copy of a song (ATB - Don't Stop) on CD, and I bought another copy on ITMS and burned it onto a CD. I listened to both, and I honestly could not tell which was which.
Credit cards come closest to an international standard for funds transfer, but few Europeans have them
I know of no one who does not have a credit card, with the possible exception of an old relative. I live in the UK. Is it different elsewhere in Europe?
It's hard to find exact statistics. Mastercard claims 3 million cardholders in Belgium, versus 450.000 VISA cardholders. In The Netherlands, the claims are 3 million MC, 2 million Visa. (There may be some overlap there).
Note that Belgium's population numbers 10 million, whereas The Netherlands has 16 million inhabitants, so even if you add up those cardholders, that's only 31% of the Dutch populace, and only 34.5% of the Belgian population that presumably have a credit card (which is not to say they ever use it - I know mine collects dust except for those 4 times a year I use it to buy stuff online; they're also often thrown in as a freebie with a bank's travel insurance).
In other words, if you only accept credit cards, you're scaring away at least 70% of your potential customers.
Note that in the US the number of cards issued stands at more than 700 million. More than 2.3 cards per person.
(This all neglects the fact that only adults can have a card, so the percentages are skewed. Though, not being able to sell to minors is also a disadvantage.)
In my experience, younger people, and people who travel are more likely to have a credit card.
It is said (my sources? google!) that credit card usage in France rivals that of the US, and in the UK and Germany usage levels are about the same.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I have a U.S. CC, but my billing address is in Sweden, so I am out of luck (until October).
Many times, you don't have to repurchase the softwares. They run fine in the Classic environment.
You don't have to learn a whole new OS. Much of your OS 9 skills can still be useful in OS X. You may need to get used to the new keyboard shortcuts, though. And the stability thing? OS 9 is like Windows compared to OS X. It seems you have never given OS X a try or a chance. You also gain much more in productivity with the preemptive multi-tasking and all the buzzwords of modern OS.
OS X does open up your software library. Much of OSS that are available to linux and *NIX and Windows are available for OS X as well. It's a good time to be a Mac user.