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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?'"
You need a credit card based in Japan to purchase from the Japanese iTMS... stupid licensing laws.
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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I find the piracy model to be superior and expect large parts of the japanese market to do the same.
If only the music industry would embrace p2p as a pr-channel similar to radio. Of course, not being able to bribe DJ's could damage the popularity of Britney Spears.
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
Bigger news is that there are no Sony songs on iTMS Japan!
The story is that this is the current hold up in Australia. Sony/BGM in Australia won't allow iTMS Australia to use their songs unless Apple agrees to sell the songs in Apple's Fairplay AAC, Microsoft's Windows Media format, and Sony's own ATRAC format.
It looks like Apple Japan just went ahead without Sony on board. If only they would do that in Australia...maybe Sony BGM is just too big a monopoly in Australia to be able to do this?
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
That's where CCP (credit card proxy) comes in to its own. You get a CC registered to any of 49 major countries (including Japan) - 'major' is defined as any country whose economy uses credit/debit cards for >5% of all transactions.
A useful (if difficult to find) service.
Actually, that's about right. CD prices tend to be 3000-4000 yen (25-35 dollars). Remember that both cost of living and pay are higher in Japan - you can't compare directly to the cost of a song in another market.
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.
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?
I dislike subscription services because they amount to extortion. Keep your subscription, or the music is effectively gone (rendered unusable). Assuming that I don't want to break the law, all the music I downloaded is useless to me if I decide to stop using the subscription service. Of course, iTMS files utilize DRM, but I can play tunes on five CPUs and unlimited iPods, as well as rip CDs. So although I don't have unlimited rights to do whatever I like with iTMS files, for my forseeable uses I feel like I'm getting a fair deal.
Beyond my general reticence toward subscription services, Yahoo's Music Unlimited doesn't work for me because:
1) I use an iPod. I don't think I'm alone in this.
2) I use a Mac. Y! Music Unlimited doesn't support the Mac.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I really wanted to do things legal and pay for all my downloads, so I started using iTunes. Where I live (Netherlands), 90% of the songs I was looking for just missed. I expected there to be few Dutch songs, and there were. But, also many international songs that are there in the US version just miss. New albums are often not available in the local version, but are in the US. I switched back to eMule a few weeks ago, I just missed too many songs.
At least P2P won't make stupid regional stores that lack almost everything, the sound quality is just as good, I don't have to jump through hoops to put the music on my MP3 player, and it's cheaper. Pretty hard to see why it's so hard for the publishers to get a decent music download system working. I'm completely willing to pay for downloads, they just don't offer the option.
According to AnimeNN, Apple's US iTunes Music Store has expanded their collection of Japanese J-pop and anime soundtrack downloads at the same time the Japanese store was opened. I'm hard-pressed to find any additions, but then again, I'm not much of a fan.
...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.
No, my opinion is that 90% of everything is crap.
However, that remaining 10% is huge. I have eclectic taste (as does my wife), so our combined collection of music when we got married a few years ago was over 1k cds.
Music is all about memory to me, and I don't want to be forced to pay a fee every month or lose my memories.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Depending on the album, at 150 or 200 yen per song, albums can become quite a bit cheaper. For example, singles CDs, which typically cost anywhere between 800-1200 yen in Japan, are about 400-500 yen on iTunes. That's a nice discount! A 12 song album would be between 1800-2400 yen, which is also significantly cheaper. Jack Johnson's 14 track album was actually 1500 yen, which is a really good deal.
:) Well, they're just starting so hopefully things will improve, but it does give the impression that the Japanese market is even more hesitant to embrace an online download service than the US market was.
The unfortunate part, though, is that their selection is really just so-so. I couldn't find X-Japan, Tube, or Southern All Stars, all very big bands in Japan. I also couldn't find many newer favorites, like SMAP, Orange Range, L'Arc en Ciel, Aiko, etc. And anime fans would be disappointed to know that there really aren't many anime songs on there, aside from "Sonic X" songs.
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.
I'm the author of this piece about the iTMS and Australia. Sony is the hold out. I reckon, now that Japan has launched, Australia iTMS sans Sony won't be far behind. http://www.bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/site/a rticleIDs/4DC115E462A7EF8ECA25702E0022FE20/