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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."
The whole idea of having some content exclusive to only parts of the world is just stupid. It really shows the media companies are living in some bizarro alternate marketplace where a bigger audience is not preferable over control. Apple should try to bring everyone together in a single gigantic music hub. I want to listen to what the Japanese market listens to, the UK indie scene, Swedish garage bands, etc. Right now iTunes is simply your local music store in digital form but it could be so much more!
Why not simply go the full mile? I want every music track, movie, tv-show and computer game ever produced, and I've got an attention span of about 30 seconds so you better hurry up. Sell to me dammit, I've got cash! It's the inevitable conlcusion to all of this, being able to queue up that one funny episode from your fav sitcom from Poland from the 80's, and having it instantly. The money the media companies could be making is a magnitude greater than what they get today, by truly selling on a global level absolutely everything they've got in their dusty archives and all future productions. It's ultimate distribution channel so if it can be digitized and sold it should.
Sigh, something tells me they'd rather just work on DRM and new region encoding schemes.
It's like deja vu all over again.