The Insanely Great Songs Apple Won't Let You Hear

FunkeyMonk writes "Slate.com has an article by Paul Collins explaining that the iTunes music store has thousands of tracks that you can't buy in the U.S. From the article: 'The iTunes Music Store has a secret hiding in plain sight: Log out of your home account in the page's upper-right corner, switch the country setting at the bottom of the page to Japan, and you're dropped down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of great Japanese bands that you've never even heard of. And they're nowhere to be found on iTunes U.S.' The article goes on to mention a few workarounds if you want to purchase foreign tunes. But this brings up a good point — why shouldn't iTunes be the great mythical omniscient music repository where all the world's music is available instantly? Is this simply a marketing decision?"

Comments

I wanted to buy "American Pie"

[hsmith]

But, you can only purchase it with the entire album, which I did not want. So, instead of getting my $0.99, I went and downloaded it for free.

Stop pulling that stupid shit, i don't mind paying for music but don't try and fuck me.

Re:Music marketing doesn't understand ubiquity

[TheRaven64]

I'm not even sure the barriers existed even then. I enjoy the music of Tom Lehrer[1], and he has done reasonably well without the backing of a label. He began singing to a few friends at parties for his own enjoyment, was persuaded to sing at clubs and later got a run of records pressed privately. He never advertised, and his records were all sold by word-of-mouth marketing. I came across his music because my parents owned two of his LPs. They live in the UK, so word of mouth had travelled a long way (apparently Princess Margaret was a fan, which helped his popularity in the UK). He now sells a CD boxed set of his complete recordings, which I have bought and enjoyed.

His later records were published by Reprise Records, but they did not enter the picture until he was already fairly well known and had self-published some LPs. His decision to sign with a record label seems to have been mostly motivated by laziness; he couldn't be bothered to handle the distribution himself, because it wasn't something he found interesting. The barrier to entry was small enough that he could do if himself, it was just more convenient for someone else to do it for him. These days it's even easier, but it wasn't very difficult even in the '50s.

[1] Definitely music-for-geeks; a Harvard mathematician singing satirical songs in the 50s and 60s.

Countries outside the USA. Fact or fiction?

[JustNiz]

Since moving to the US from Europe 5 years ago, I've noticed that it's very hard to keep up with whats going in in the rest of the world once you're in the US.

There's hardly any news about the rest of the world in the media (Iraq excepted). I've generaly presumed that to be either one of the causes or effects of the generally low level of US education, but now I'm wondering if its not just a marketing decision.