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."

Comments

Since this is an Apple product

[Killjoy_NL]

I know there is a Windows client for I-Tunes, but this article made me wonder.

How many Apple users are there in Europe anyway?

(Not trying to belittle them in any way, I'm just curious)

Re:Since this is an Apple product

[falcon5768]

a surprising amount actually, though Apples big client outside the US is Japan.

Re:Since this is an Apple product

[Killjoy_NL]

I'm in the Netherlands, I've had to fix Macs for a living alongside "normal" pc's.

I haven't seen a lot Macs, even though that the store that I worked for was one of the biggest Mac-retailers in the NL. They stopped selling them a while ago though, but I think they will be back soon since they are gaining popularity again.

uk + fr + de != eu

[kraker]

What? Only UK, France and Germany?

Why not the whole of Europe? Did Apple also excluded one or more of the States of America?

Grmbl...

Re:uk + fr + de != eu

[falcon5768]

or more the record companies couldnt agree with Apple, you know kinda like how the US record companies are trying to force Apple to charge more than 9.99 for albums by not releasing entire albums unless they get their way.

Re:uk + fr + de != eu

[wfberg]

This is probably due to two things;

1) licensing issues. Each European country tends to have their own licensing agency, which licenses, say the latest Madonna track - even though the rights in all countries might be owned by a single company, you still have to go through these intermediaries (monopolies).

While it is in theory possible to negotiate terms with only one intermediary for the whole of Europe (and has been for some time, think only of all the unencrypted pan-European tv and radio stations) it is in practice not only hard to do (these monopolies are bureaucracies which have a hard time understanding the Internet - there IS no standard contract) but you won't be able to shop around for a European tarriff. That is, if you close a deal within a country, you can bargain, but pan-European rights are locked down in a monopoly by way of agreement along all the national intermediaries.

2) Europeans tend to speak different languages from country to country.

They also have entirely different national banking systems, which only pay lip service to a single European transaction system. (e.g. yes, you can transfer money using an IBAN account number at the same rate as national money transfers (sometimes this is free), 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, the banks don't accept any liability what so ever. Credit cards come closest to an international standard for funds transfer, but few Europeans have them, and even fewer would give out the number on the internet).

Then there's the issue of sales tax, statutory customer rights (the EU wide policies only specify the minimum, so member states could have enacted laws that allow for returns of tunes), etc. etc.

Opening up a pan-European shopping site is no mean feat.

UK pricing

[MikeS2k]

Well, kudos to them for not making us Britains pay 99p a track, like I'm sure some other companies would.
We still pay the highest price, but I'm getting used to being shafted out of every penny I own here anyway.

Exchange Rates

[indie1982]

Well i think we're getting a shitty deal in the UK when 0.99 euro converts to 65p and UK users have to pay 79p a track!

Price differentiation

[16K Ram Pack]

By EU law, can they do this?

I thought that the EU was dead against people being able to price people differently based on country. In other words, if you go to a site, that site can't give you a different price based on your country of origin. But, that having a UK site and a French site with different prices is OK.

Re:Not much on there yet...

[RogerWilco]

You're so right,

In my cicle of friends I see a lot of people downloading not the films/series that are broadcasted on TV here in the Netherlands, but especially the stuff that's not on the local networks.
Japaneese Anime, Brasilian soaps, indy music, episodes that have aired in the USA but not yet in europe, etc.

They would pay for a legal alternative, but it just is not there.
There are hundreds of niche markets that do not warrant nation wide broadcasting, but could make gold money in some bittorrent/iTunes combination, where increased demand would increase the number of nodes.
DSL+Tivo-like product could do this in a very convenient way. The box would function as a seed for the last 20 things you downloaded next to the Tivo like behaviour.