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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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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.
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?
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
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.