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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?'"
It's called "price fixing", and when done within a single country is usually illegal. When done between different countries, no single country's law can apply, and even though it's illegal in BOTH countries, it's legal if done separately in each country.
The basic idea is, as usual, to maximize proffit. If a band is really popular in the USA but not popular in say, Europe, the most profitable price point of the album in USA might be $19 where it might be maximized at say, $12 in Europe due to low demand. They are trying to prevent an entrepenur from buying a few thousand CDs in Europe and shipping them to the US and selling for say, $16 each. This undercuts their market in the US by $2/unit, costing them sales. Instead they only see the $12 where they could be seeing the $19.
They want the $19 and do everything they can to see that they get it.
If price fixing wasn't illegal in your country, things would be a lot worse... like in the USA a Garth Brooks album might go for twice as much in Tennessee as it did in say, Alaska. We'd probably see more aggressive region coding on DVDs as well. Instead of 7 world region codes, they'd probably try to like split up countries into regions too. Imagine having to buy a DVD that was not only USA region, but was say, in Central timezone code too? Think of the mess that would make for the consumer. And the recording companies would LOVE it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
...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
Several studies disagree with you, as do my personal experiences. I download music to check it out, then buy the CD. Most genuine music fans do the same.
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.