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

How about everywhere next?

[sterno]

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.

Re:How about everywhere next?

[Midnight Thunder]

The issue is with the record companies. They have issue if you don't buy through the local distributor.

What I would love to see happen is for merchants to be able to be able to import CDs and music for which there is no local distributor. The day a local distributor picks up that music the merchant would be given a time frame to sell their remaining stock, and all future purchases would have to go through the cartel - uh I meant local music distributor ;)

This would allow merchants to provide the selection they want to provide, without being blocked by anyone.

where next ? the backstreet markets of course !

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Where next?

[Approaching.sanity]

How about one universal store with all the music from every band availible for sale from them and not their record companies.

/idealism

Re:Song prices

[bennomatic]

Well, they usually portray it this way:

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...

Re:And where is Sony?

[ickoonite]

Bigger news is that there are no Sony songs on iTMS Japan!

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...' :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.

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...

...unless you're Steve Jobs. :P

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 :D