So this iTunes fiasco goes further than I thought.
I should have thought of this given how much business-related IT stuff I've done in the last couple of years.
There is no ability to purchase music from another country.
That's a bit of an overstatement - made for effect. If you have an address
and payment vector in another country, you can use them to buy from that country's iTunes store.
But I cannot buy, for example, a tune from the Australian iTunes store while listing my residence and payment method as being in the US.
So the group I wanted to buy the music off (Gotye) is unavailable in the iTunes US store. So I'm screwed.
Basically, this is the record companies acting as a cartel to restrain trade. Exactly similar to the video market.. in that one cannot buy a DVD in another country (the dastardly region coding) because of restrictions placed by the studios on when and how they release a movie in a given geographic market.
Since music rights may be held by different companies in different countries we end up with this mess.
I want to spend money to buy a record company's product but I'm not allowed by their rules to do so.
How stupid is that?
Interesting that it took Apple's dominance of the music market to surface this interesting tidbit. I'm not sure that it comes up quite so easily in other circumstances (less obvious).
Posted by artandscience at September 14, 2007 10:08 PM