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iTMS Launches in Japan
ickoonite writes "The iTunes Music Store has finally come to the Land of the Rising Sun! After months of tricky negotiations, Apple has reached agreements with 15 record companies for the supply of around 1 million tracks, with per-track prices between ¥150 and ¥200. AppleInsider also has some blurb, and Apple has an (English) press release on the launch is here. The question now is: 'Where next?'"
Comments?
Slashdot = ((Technology + Politics) / Trolls) % Grammar Nazis
Why can't this be universal? Why must "entertainment media" be regionalized? I mean I can sort of understand the supply and demand of physical media like DVDs but downloadable media files?
crazy dynamite monkey
The awesome thing about the $5.00/month subscription service is that you are paying that $60 per year rental fee for as long as you want to enjoy your music. If I buy a song from iTunes, I can listen to it for 10 years for $.99. If I want to continue to listen to a song I'm renting from Yahoo, it would cost $600 to rent it for 10 years.
...the question is, when will the studios open up their gi-normous back catalogs for digital download? Decades of out-of-press, cool-ass music which could be a source of free revenue for the labels are languishing in magnetic-tape form in what I hope are climate-controlled vault conditions.
I think keeping old music on ice is the same as saying you don't want money.
And I hereby acknowledge that this post is only pretending to be shocked at the long-term, and evidently continuing idiocy of music labels.
http://www.farmerbob.org
I wish it was so - I tried to purchase some M-flo last night but couldn't because I am not in Japan. I wish we could buy music from other stores (if the artist wasn't in our own store - that way you can't play the currency conversion game).
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
I've started listening to a bunch of Mandarin-language music lately, and for track-at-a-time sampling, I pretty much have no choice but to listen to unlicensed Internet radio stations (= piracy) or download from P2P networks (= piracy). I'd happily pay to sample a few more tracks by the artists I've heard on those radio stations, but there's no way for me to do it, and it's not worth paying through the nose to import a CD from overseas only to find that the track I heard was the only one on the disc worth listening to.
Oh well, yet another case of "I want to give them my money, but they won't let me." (See: DVD region coding, etc.) Guess I need a fancy MBA degree to see how that makes good business sense.
Peter Payne, the American-born founder of J-List, a source for all things Japanese, had this to say in today's instalment of his regular newsletter:
"After a long wait, Apple's iTunes Japan music store has finally opened, allowing customers here to download Japanese and international music for around $1.75 per song. Despite the large number of digital-savvy users in Japan, it's not at all surprising to me that it took so long for Apple to get the iTunes store up and running. Japan can be a very conservative place, and to big companies with established businesses, nothing is more terrifying than change, any change at all. Apple has had to navigate between greedy record companies who have kept the prices of CDs at the artificially high price of $30 for decades, and industry groups like the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) and the Recording Industry of Japan (RIAJ), who have closed ranks against any kind of digital distribution of music that doesn't guarantee more profits for them than conventional CDs. A big problem was JASRAC's insistence that Apple follow "Japan's rules" when it came to selling music online, which apparently meant that the industry group was to receive 7.7% of every song sold in addition to what the actual copyright holders receive. It's all very silly when you think about the fact that in Japan, you can go into any one of thousands of CD rental shops and rent a whole album for $3 or less. Sadly, Japan's copyright-happy record industry lacked the vision to allow Apple to sell Japanese music to customers outside of Japan, so worldwide fans of JPOP are shut out from participating in the Japan iTMS. Apple isn't the first company that's had to endure pressure from the establishment in Japan: Amazon was blocked from selling products below list price on their site here, since price fixing is still allowed for some products, like books and CDs. If there's one good thing that's come from the past decade of recession in Japan, it's that many of Japan's closed economic doors have been forced open, letting the light of competition and common sense flood in. If you want to see a hilarious commercial that marries the iPod with Sazae-san, one the most popular anime in Japan's history, here's the link: http://www.jbox.com/sazae (Quicktime required)"
That's interesting, but has nothing to do with the point that iTunes + iPod is the only cross-platform solution. If you buy music online from iTunes, you can listen to it on a Mac or a Windows computer, or both, or an iPod. If you buy music online from anywhere else, you are forever stuck with Windows and forever denied the ultimate music player - the iPod. Bummer.