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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?'"
THe problem that I really have with ITune's international support is that it doesn't allow you to go across borders. I can browse through music from the UK but as a US user I cannot buy any of it. That's kind of dumb consider I could buy the CD that way.
I'm assuming the reason this is the case is a track that costs $1 in the US might be $1.50 in the UK for the same artist.
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because its cheaper to pop into town and buy freshly pressed CD's complete with packaging and no DRM or crappy quality for much less than 200yen
the record companies still don't get it
until they do, it won't change a thing
How about one universal store with all the music from every band availible for sale from them and not their record companies.
/idealism
RTFA again for the best results.
No kidding.
I opened up iTunes to look at the Japan store, and what's one of the big things they have available?
"The Complete B'z"
And I love B'z. They kick ass six ways to next tuesday. I'd so be out $170 and several hundred MB of space.
10,000 songs @ $1.00 = $10,000.00.
infinite songs @ $5.00/mo = $5.00/mo.
What they hope that people won't notice is that this means that if you stop paying, it all goes away. So let's say you spend $60.00 at iTMS, you (theoretically) can play your 60 favorite songs FOREVER. If you spend $60.00 at Yahoo, then stop paying, then your infinite songs go away.
It's not a matter of which one is better; I could probably argue for either one. It's a matter of which one is better *for me*, since it's only my money that I have any control over.
If it were up to me, there would be a hybrid model, with $0.99 songs, a $5.00 subscription option, and with the $5.00 subscription option, you get 25%-50% off of songs you purchase after hearing them.
Actually, if were really up to me, I would push artists to adopt creative commons licenses, and recommend that everyone allow free file trading. The people who love the artists still buy collections, still go see shows, still buy videos, etc. Anyone remember when Spinal Tap was coming out on DVD? They gave away their soundtrack album for free, with a site called "Tapster", as a promotional tool for the DVD. It worked for me...
The CB App. What's your 20?
Where next? The Moon of course, and then Mars.
What better DRM hegemony is there than the ability to turn off their air when they don't obey the corporate masters?
1) talk to your governmental representatives, labor unions, etc. and get them to remove legal barriers, tariffs, etc. that block such a thing.
2) talk to the folks that hold the publishing rights to the music you want to purchase so that they remove blocks to such a thing.
3) talk to the various music industry representatives and organizations, get them to understand how good it could be.
I assure you Apple doesn't want to have a separate store for every country, it costs them money, sales and time having separate country specific stores.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Ulaanbaatar,+Mongoli a&spn=0.111235,0.240704&t=k&hl=en
Or that spot that's the most disant land location from any ocean- the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=46.283333,86.666667 &spn=0.229462,0.481407&t=k&hl=en
Or Mecca and Vatican city with free George Clinton songs. We can end this war if both sides can just be helped to get their funk on.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=21.422224,39.826469 &spn=0.072718,0.120352&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=rome&ll=41.902564,12 .452638&spn=0.015445,0.030088&t=k&hl=en
Bigger news is that there are no Sony songs on iTMS Japan!
:P). Sony, of course, has a lot of clout in Japan - the linked-to Asahi article notes that Sony Music Entertainment is Japan's biggest record company.
...unless you're Steve Jobs. :P
:D
I commented on this in the story proper (I am the Apple Blog article's author, so the posting on Slashdot was shameless self-promotion, but Piquepaille can get away with it, so I thought 'What the hell...'
But all that is as nothing if you cannot play it. Given that the iPod is, speaking worldwide, something of a standard*, if only achieved through sheer market dominance**, it would be foolish to ignore such standards, i.e. by rolling one's own music download service and supplying one's catalogue to that service exclusively. Of course, as I note in my posting, Sony is no stranger to such folly (see OpenMG in the face of MP3, AAC or, heaven forbid, even WMA, which is frankly farcical, or the Memory Stick in the face of, well, anything else). It may well be that some time will have to pass (and a considerable amount of money lost due to missed opportunity) before Sony will acquiesce and come on board. But any time wasted will be more to their cost than to Apple's (it has been discussed at length how little profit Apple makes via iTMS).
In any event, this is quite a significant step. The Japanese being as they are, this could well be a impressive growth market for Apple, providing they market appropriately (they need especially to think of mobile phone users), and could be a key player in the run up to the billion-songs-sold mark.
Sony BMG won't be able to hold out forever. I don't know what the iPod's market share is like down under, but I'm willing to bet that it's higher than Japan's relatively meagre 36% (according to Apple figures). From a shareholder viewpoint (and we know that in the end, this is all the capitalists care about), any such stance by Sony would almost be negligence. There is no room for such emotion in the corporate arena...
iTMS Australia will happen. It may just partly be that Sony BMG does have a greater monopoly on content there and, also, that Australia's market is not big enough for Apple to release without a major record company on board. The Japanese market is huge - and they've got most of the big names involved (including Avex Tracks, who are responsible for many of the verging-on-paedophilia teenybopper groups in Japan and who run their own download service, IIRC) - so even without Sony, it makes sense.
We'll see what happens, of course, but I'd be very surprised if Sony doesn't eventually acquiesce. 'Beleaguered' isn't an inappropriate term for that company.
iqu
iTunes lets me listen to my purchased music on my Windows box, my Mac PowerBook, and my iPod.
Anything besides iTunes is Windows only, non-iPod only.
Apple is the only cross-platform solution, as weird as that may sound.
Perhaps compile a list of the pirated tracks and send it (anonymously) to Sony BMG with a brief note saying:
"By blocking the iTMS Australia, you are losing money from me.
"Multiply my case by the hundreds of thousands of other frustrated consumers in the same situation and see if your accountants think that makes financial sense."
And the amusing thing is that it's actually illegal in Australia to put music on that iPod, unless you happen to be the copyright owner. I'm serious: the law in Australia forbids the transferral of music from one media to another. Your baby likes chewing on CDs? Well, you're just going to have to buy another copy of your favourite CD when the baby gets to it. No, you can't burn a copy to protect yourself; that's against the law. You can't rip CDs legally; you can't legally record all your old LPs onto CD; etc., etc.
So the next time you're in Australia, when you see somebody walking around with the tell-tale white headphones, you can rest assured that the odds are well and truly in favour of that person being a lawbreaker.