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

Re:Devil's in the Contracts

[mgblst]

It really sounds like this issue was brought up by some teenager from japan, who recently move to the US.

Firstly, these Japanese pop bands, just like pop bands outside of the two major music producing areas (USA and UK, with exceptions now and again), are very simple and derivative. Even by pop music standards. They are only really popular, because people want to hear songs in their own language.

Secondly, just because Apple can sell those songs technically, doesn't mean they can legally. You addressed this issue.

Slashdot, maybe we can stay away from the teenage blogs.

Re:No, it's a label decision.

[polar red]

They evidently don't have US licences for all the japanese stuff. So, you need a license to be able to sell music ???? Is this 1984 ?

Re:Because with binary data on the internet there

[polar red]

no borders. YES ! abolish them!