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

Marketing? No. Legals

[blowdart]

It has nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with the selling rights granted to stores. A label in the US tends to only have the rights to sell the track in the US (and Canada). Labels in the UK usally can only sell in the UK. Even if the labels are global you still need to gain the rights to sell from EMI UK (to sell to the British), EMI France (to sell to France) and so on and you are constrained by the limits placed on you when you are granted the rights by the label.

This has been the situation for years and is not just limited to digital music. And it's been discussed on slashdot before, on why it took Apple so long to open iTunes outside the US, why the Zune store is US only and so on.

It's the licensing, stupid

[Maury Markowitz]

Ever song is licensed by a different company in different geographical regions. Those firms are typically under an international umbrella group, but that doesn't change anything. General Electric Canada sells different products than General Electric (US), and no-one finds that odd, so I'm not sure why anyone would be remotely surprised here.

Maury