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

Fuck twofo

[Anonymous Coward]

Twofo Is Dying
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Twofo is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleagured University of Warwick filesharing community when ITS confirmed that Twofo total share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all file sharing. Coming hot on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Twofo has lost more share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Twofo is collapsing in complete disarry, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Student comprehensive leeching test.

You don't need to be one of the Hub Operators to predict Twofo's future. The hand writing is on the toilet wall: Twofo faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Twofo because Twofo is dying. Things are looking very bad for Twofo. As many of us are already aware, Twofo continues to lose users. Fines and disconnections flow like a river of feces.

N00b Campus users are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of their total share. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Twofo sharers fool_on_the_hill and Twinklefeet only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Twofo is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Sources indicate that there are at most 150 users in the hub. How many filelists have been downloaded? Let's see. 719. But 1621 IP addresses have been logged, and 1727 nicks have been sighted connecting to one user over the last term. How many searches are there? 600 searches in 3 hours. The highest sharer on campus, known as "firstchoice", or Andrew.Maddison@warwick.ac.uk in real life, was sharing over 1 TiB, despite working in ITS and not being on the resnet. He's only there so people off campus who think they're too good for bittorrent can continue to abuse the University's internet connection.

Due to troubles at the University of Warwick, lack of internet bandwidth, enforcements of Acceptable Usage Policies, abysmal sharing, retarded leechers, clueless n00bs, and ITS fining and disconnecting users, Twofo has no future. All major student surveys show that Twofo has steadily declined in file share. Twofo is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Twofo is to survive at all it will be among p2p hardcore fuckwits, desperate to grab stuff for free off the internet. Nothing short of a miracle could save Twofo from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Twofo is dead.

Fact: Twofo is dying

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.

MOD PARENT DOWN: REFERRAL SPAMMER

[Anonymous Coward]

The link to Amazon in the parent's post contains a referral tag (his blog's name plus the general referral code 21).

Re:Licensing, licensing, licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes it even more retarded ...

Because only retarded people listen to dance anyway.

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.