The Australian federal government passed laws earlier in the year that made it perfectly legal to make as many copies of a CD for personal use as you have devices that can play it in whatever format they choose. That means that I can make a legal copy of my Sony-BMG CD here in Australia for my computer, my iPod, my DVD player, my car stereo, probably even my crappy 30-year-old clock radio with built-in tape player.
So going off your statement, I guess you'll be pulling out of the Australian market altogether then, seeing as you failed to successfully lobby the Australian government to consider this theft?
CD's in this country are not that expensive. I think they have been about $25AU for at least 15 years.
Which is around $US20, and at the higher end of prices there.
I'm in Australia too, and I routinely see CDs on sale in department stores for as much as AU$32 (or US$25.60). The prices they charge here in comparison to other places are ludicrous, particularly with older CDs. It's commonplace here for a latest release to be available at around AU$20, but if you want the same artist's CD before that, it's likely full price.
If we want to buy about five CDs at once, it's cheaper to get them from the US via Amazon - the prices here are so bad that once you order at least five from Amazon, the shipping costs no longer make the discs more expensive than they are across the road. And by "shipping costs", I mean "the amount it costs to send a bulk parcel from the US to Australia within a couple of weeks". Try it sometime. It's fricking expensive.
There are even budget stores here that have taken to importing cheap Indonesian copies, and they're still able to sell them cheaper than the usual price we pay.
The price of CDs in Australia are expensive, especially compared to other places around the world. Believing that AU$25 is a good price for a CD is exactly what the record companies want you to think, and they've made money hand over fist in Australia from exactly that attitude. The fact that they've kept the prices level despite inflation just makes people believe it more.
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The Australian federal government passed laws earlier in the year that made it perfectly legal to make as many copies of a CD for personal use as you have devices that can play it in whatever format they choose. That means that I can make a legal copy of my Sony-BMG CD here in Australia for my computer, my iPod, my DVD player, my car stereo, probably even my crappy 30-year-old clock radio with built-in tape player.
So going off your statement, I guess you'll be pulling out of the Australian market altogether then, seeing as you failed to successfully lobby the Australian government to consider this theft?
CD's in this country are not that expensive. I think they have been about $25AU for at least 15 years.
Which is around $US20, and at the higher end of prices there.
I'm in Australia too, and I routinely see CDs on sale in department stores for as much as AU$32 (or US$25.60). The prices they charge here in comparison to other places are ludicrous, particularly with older CDs. It's commonplace here for a latest release to be available at around AU$20, but if you want the same artist's CD before that, it's likely full price.
If we want to buy about five CDs at once, it's cheaper to get them from the US via Amazon - the prices here are so bad that once you order at least five from Amazon, the shipping costs no longer make the discs more expensive than they are across the road. And by "shipping costs", I mean "the amount it costs to send a bulk parcel from the US to Australia within a couple of weeks". Try it sometime. It's fricking expensive.
There are even budget stores here that have taken to importing cheap Indonesian copies, and they're still able to sell them cheaper than the usual price we pay.
The price of CDs in Australia are expensive, especially compared to other places around the world. Believing that AU$25 is a good price for a CD is exactly what the record companies want you to think, and they've made money hand over fist in Australia from exactly that attitude. The fact that they've kept the prices level despite inflation just makes people believe it more.
Yeah, no kidding. One would hope that if they actually pull it out and win, they'll blow that $150K a month on a bunch of software test engineers. :)