A day or two after Apple celebrates selling its 500,000,000th song, it seems appropriate to ask why Australia is yet to ? According to the Bulletin Magazine, it’s Sony’s fault.
A head-butting exercise between two digital-age mastodons is blocking Australians from getting their own iTunes Music Store. The iTMS, which has sold close to half a billion songs since April 2003, is the only way the world’s 15 million iPod owners can legally buy downloadable music. The United States, European Union and Scandinavia all have an iTMS. Australia doesn’t, and the reason is because SonyBMG Music is holding out.
“There’s one reason why Sony is holding out,” says a prominent music industry pundit. And that’s because Sony’s also a hardware company and they want to push their own proprietary digital format.Â
So Sony is holding out because it’s trying to push its own ATRAC encoding format over Apple’s AAC? Just kidding.
Sony, according to industry sources, is holding out over price. Apple is also concerned about price, but for a different reason. Sony and all record companies exist to make a profit from their artists. Apple’s not interested in creating entertainment. The iTMS exists for one reason: to lock in and drive customers towards the iPod, which accounted for 31% of Apple’s revenue in the last financial quarter.
Despite the article claiming that there are two “only one reason(s) why Sony is holding out”, neither makes sense to me. Whether the delay is a dispute over encoding or pricing, why is Australia the only country affected by this? Perhaps there is a reason for Sony to negotiate harder here, but what is it?
August 6th, 2005 at 15:27
Not helped by the usual competence and responsiveness of Apple Australia, either, I am sure. After all, they’re still trying to convince people to buy this new-fangled Macintosh thing…