May 13
Itunes Music Store Europe in June?
2004 at 03.11 am posted by Veerle
According to the French Macplus website our patience may be rewarded. If this report is accurate we could see the iTunes Music Store go live as soon as June. The European store is currently undergoing a live testing phase. As it looks now the store is scheduled to open in mid-June but could see delays until no later than September. A delay beyond June would somehow be attributed to the launch of 4 competitive online European music services, which are set to open in October.
To me at least it’s not all good news! Ok, this is still not confirmed but according to this report the price for a song would be 1,29 Euro. 0,80 Euro would go directly to the record labels. It was to expect that the price in good old Europe would be higher then the US. To me 1 Euro would have been a better price and at least pretty fair when compared with the US.
It looks that the record labels here are trying to set the price high enough to fill their pockets and that way correct the mistake they made in US since there is much talk about higher prices in the US too. At least Apple denied that prices would go up in the US.
Nobody seems to get it that price is an important factor in all this. The one and only reason why cd’s are failing is the higher price we pay and of course the shift to other spending areas like DVD, Ringtones, Games etc…
Which brings me to the last bit of news that the Store here would also carry phone ringtones. This is an emerging market especially those latest generation polyphonic ringtones.
2served
1
1 Euro for a song is ridiculous. If you download a complete album, you’ll end up paying 15 to 20 Euro, which is *exactly* the price of a regular CD in the shop, but you paid for MP3, which is heavily compressed, and therefore low(er) quality music. Allofmp3.com is alot cheaper (1 Euro for a complete album), and you get the choice between OGG and MP3, and bitrate quality.
Polyphonic ringtones are the same : they are in fact plain midi files, so buy yourself a data cable, and download ringtones for free from eg hamienet.com, and transfer them from your computer to your mobile. Saved me lots of money.
2
I don’t think 1 euro for a song is ridiculous. Just think about all the albums in your collection that you bought just for that one particular song you liked, but wasn’t avaiable on single? Now you can put together an album with only songs you like best!
And apparently you haven’t tried the iTunes Music Store yet (you can use all the functionality when you’re in Europe, but you can’t buy anything). If you had, you would have noticed that a full album is only € 9.90. An album price is never calculated by multiplying the price of one song by the number of songs on the album…
I agree with you on the ringtones! Buying ringtones is dull and something for giggling schoolgirls :) sorry. It’s really sad that Apple is even considering this… it’s a marginal business.