Missing the mark in Australia
p2pnet.net News:- Big Music claims it’s making tremendous headway through sales from the corporate online music sites it backs and supplies.
This assertion certainly isn’t true in North America and now a new study suggests the labels aren’t gaining much from ‘authorised’ download pages in Australian either.
Copyright expert Alex Malik says 65% of the titles in the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Top 20 singles chart couldn’t be found on one of the three cartel-supplied mp3 services, and only 45% and 30% were available for purchase on the other two.
“With respect to ‘new’ music the problem of the lack of availability of authorised mp3 downloads was worse, with 56% to 67% of new release titles being unavailable from authorised mp3 providers, he says.
Malik, a former ARIA in-house lawyer and ex-senior legal officer at the Australian Communications Authority, Canberra, says Jesse McCartney’s national #1 single “Beautiful Soul” is among the missing tracks.
“Jesse’s fans … have been left with 2 unpalatable choices,” he says. “They have to purchase Jesse’s CD single and rip it, or they have to download the track from a peer to peer service.
Malik also points out that Australians can’t access corporate mp3 services from the US without a US credit card, “so they are limited to NineMSN Music, Destra (and their partners) and Bigpond Music”.
On top of that, typically, the ‘legal’ mp3s that are available in Oz are 66% more expensive than US downloads, he says, adding that most single downloads in Australia go for $1.89 per track, compared to the US $0.88 (Aus $1.14) Walmart download sale price.
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April 5th, 2005 at 10:49 pm
mp3 downloads? you can download mpeg 1 layer 3 media files in australia? or are those files really drm-crippled files using another propietary codec? those are _not_ mp3s.
April 6th, 2005 at 1:29 am
For the most part I don’t think any of the sites mentioned here use DRM, the selection is so absurdly pitiful that you wouldn’t want to purchase most the music (or use p2p to acquire it, for that matter) anyhow.
As an Oz resident who occasionally can’t find something using Xfactor ( http://www.xfactor.cc ), iTunes would be nice to have as a fallback. As someone who still uses a CD Walkman, the fairPlay DRM means very little to me. (You can burn Apple’s DRM to CD as many times as you like, and even re-rip that CD if you can deal with a slight loss of in the already compressed track/s.)
The most pressing matter here is ARIA’s lawsuits against Sharman – where is the legit, ‘legal’ online download source? Where is the legal alternative?