Borderless Shopping

iTunes Music Store, you lost some busi­ness today.

At 99¢ per song, iTMS lost $13.86 to Amazon.ca. Why? Angela heard a Rufus Wain­right song on an NPR pro­gram about 4 or 5 months ago. It is a bonus track found only on for­eign releas­es of a col­lec­tion of B‑sides called “Want Two.” The song is called “Quand Vous Mourez de Nos Amours” (in French, obvi­ous­ly). I went to Tow­er Records to buy it, and they don’t have an import sec­tion any­more. Fur­ther, even if they did have it, they’d want $35 for it. I know that Amazon.fr car­ried the album for a while, and we actu­al­ly had thought we just buy a copy while in Paris. How­ev­er, when in Paris for only a few days, you tend to not waste time look­ing for rel­a­tive­ly obscure albums.

Today, Angela called me ask­ing how to buy songs from the Cana­di­an iTunes music store, because they had the song she was inter­est­ed in. It isn’t car­ried on the Amer­i­can iTMS. Why? In whose mind does this make any sense? Where are the vast sums of mon­ey to be col­lect­ed on hav­ing songs that can­not be found in this coun­try? How can an indus­try com­plain about ille­gal down­loads when this sort of thing dri­ves peo­ple to do just that? I want to buy my music. I want Rufus Wain­right to get com­pen­sat­ed for record­ing weird lit­tle French songs. I want to be able to down­load it to my iPod and lis­ten imme­di­ate­ly. With infi­nite shelf space and near­ly zero cost of deliv­ery, why is this not possible?

iTunes Music store lost a lit­tle mon­ey today. Angela prob­a­bly would have only bought the one song for 99¢ and that’s not going to make or break any busi­ness, musi­cian, or con­sumer. How­ev­er, if Chris Ander­son is to be believed, when mul­ti­plied by the num­ber of obscure songs that only a hand­ful of peo­ple in this coun­try want, the amount of mon­ey is stag­ger­ing. At least Amazon.ca has no qualms with ship­ping to me. For­tu­nate­ly, nei­ther does Amazon.co.uk or any oth­er Ama­zon store around the world I’ve bought music and movies from. I’ll con­tin­ue to do it, and I’m not alone. Some­day, maybe the exec­u­tives and legal depart­ment will wake up and see the prof­its there. Sad­ly, they’re more like­ly to try and sue me and get me and those like to stop. That’s okay, there’s always bit-tor­rent.

Published
Categorized as Music

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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