I’ve moaned about this before but bear with me. I’m so frustrated that iTunes hasn’t yet come to New Zealand. I’m a big music listener and frankly, I’m tired of listening to the radio while I commute. There’s just far too many ads. I love discovering new music and lately I’ve found that more and more music I like isn’t getting any airplay. When I’m online lately, I’ve been using last.fm and Pandora to discover new songs and artists.
Oh, and I’m a little obsessed with the music from Grey’s Anatomy (importing the soundtrack from Amazon because it’s not available here isn’t enough). I’ve fallen in love with Imogen Heap’s music (again, Amazon imports).
I have a good friend who’s been lending me CDs of less-mainstream artists – Evermore (beautiful album), Phoenix United, Turin Brakes, The Album Leaf, Transatlanticism and Portishead – among others.
But I’d like more music to listen to while commuting. I’d love to download a tonne of songs… but because I’m in New Zealand, it’s not easy. Our copyright laws here are well overdue for an update. You see it’s still illegal to format-shift. I.e., it’s illegal here to copy songs from your CD to your computer, iPod or cellphone. It’s illegal to make a mix tape or CD. It’s illegal to make a back-up copy of your CDs. Of course, no-one I know keeps the law in this regard – and iPods are everywhere here. Technically, the only digital music New Zealanders should have is digital music they’ve bought online.
When law changes to allow one single backup copy of our CDs (like Americans already enjoy) were proposed a couple of years ago here, the head of Sony NZ, Michael Glading, said “At the end of the day, you’re sending a message that it’s okay to copy, and that is going to kill our business,” he said. Of course, nothing has happened yet and the law is falling well the pace of technology and far behind what consumers want.
Here’s another problem: iTunes hasn’t launched here yet – presumably due to legal sagas and record companies not wanting to hand over digital sale rights. Our NZ online store options currently stand at:
- Amplifier – MP3 format but only a limited number of New Zealand artist tracks only. No DRM which is nice. ~$1.20US for a single.
- Coke Tunes. Try going to their site on a Mac (“the Mac version of Windows Media Player does not support the Digital Rights Management technology used to protect the music”) or in Firefox (“CokeTunes does not currently work in the Mozilla Firefox browser due to technical limitations”) and you’re turned away at the door. They don’t have anywhere near the music selection iTunes does (not all labels are on board) and the files are in WMA and have DRM. ~$1.05US for a single.
- Digirama – WMA and DRM again. ~$1.01US for a single.
In summary: there’s currently no legal way to buy non-New Zealand music online within New Zealand for iPods. (Yes, you can illegally play around with the formats if you have the right software and convert from WMA and get rid of the DRM.)
So when TechCrunch reviews AllTunes – a Russian site which will accept overseas credit cards (unlike other online MP3 stores), naturally I was interested. Besides at a mere 9c US a song, it’s attractive financially. But is it legal? People argue both sides over at TechCrunch’s post. It seems to be taking advantage of a legal loophole there and I wonder if anything makes it back to the artist.
People are finding other ways of trying to get around the system legally – such as purchasing US iTunes gift certificates via Ebay (!), getting a friend in the US to purchase the songs on their credit card and then reimbursing via Paypal (messy and you’re paying for too many currency conversions).
Oh, and don’t get me started on the fact that there’s nothing legal to play on video iPods. No Google videos here. No TV show downloads here. *Sob*.
Territorial rights for digital content make no sense at all to me.
your thoughts
Pete
Rachel, I feel your pain. Well not quite, we have pretty much everything here, but I sympathise. I have to admit, I sometimes use http://www.mp3search.ru it claims to be legal and they’ve never managed to shut it down, but I can see why the ethics of it may be a bit dodgy as the artists can’t make much.
I’m sending you an invite to eMusic, It’s american based, but I think you should be able to join, as I did, you get 25 free tracks to try it out, and if you wish to continue its $9.95 a month for 40 tracks, fully legal. The downside is it’s independant labels, but there are some quite big ones on there, Like Matador and such things. I’d suggest, if it lets you sign up giving Belle & Sebastian a listen, at least to the samples to see if you like, they’re a pretty big name and another band thats into the Q&A’s and suggestions on their website, not to mention the fact that the latest album inlay notes were filled with website comments and answers. If you like Reuben Morgan they also have his latest one on there too.
If you want to find out a little more about them, there is something on Rolling Stone about them, eMusic Claims Niche as Indie iTunes.
Pete
Woo! My link HTML worked. I still childishly enjoy writing any html, no matter how simple and seeing it actually work, I think it’s rebelling against WISYWIG.
/Karen/
My husband is hugely into eMusic!!
We have the same problem here—copyright law hasn’t caught up yet with the populous. In a copyright seminar I went to at my church last month, this lady who specialises in Australian intellectual property law said that the government was going to amend the legislation this year. It was an interesting seminar, not just because of all the stuff she mentioned which I noted in my blog post, but also because of all the grey areas in the law—things like how it’s technically illegal to record off the TV with your VCR (not because it just is but because the copyright laws don’t stretch far enough to cover the underlying rights of the costume designers, the music composers, etc.) and yet the Australian government has said they will never come after individuals for doing it. There seems this grey area where doing something is technically illegal (e.g. putting music on your iPod) and yet ought to be fine (it’s stupid that it’s illegal to put music on your iPod because that’s what iPods are for). This makes us Christians uncomfortable because we’d rather that the government was more specific but it just takes them so long to update the laws. As one guy commented on Ben’s blog when they were discussing the issue,
Not that that answers the question but it’s worth thinking about the role of the law in our lives when the law out of date …
Chrono Cr@cker
Hey Rach,
Right? As long as Alltunes is not facing any heat from the RIAA, you should use it to the fullest.
You should definitely go ahead with Alltunes. It’s not illegal, meaning it’s legal.
I’ve never used iTunes so I have a question. Can’t we use paypal to download songs of iTunes? Paypal is available in NZ right?
sole
Not sure about the possible success of my proposal, but have you tried listening to music from netlabels? There are way more unknown than the mass media artists, but there’s loads of great music outside there waiting for anybody to download them FOR FREE. Yes… absolutely free… you just have to enjoy the music.
For example, some friends have a little netlabel/group called roterfleck. All of the releases are available for downloading wherever you are, just because we want the people to enjoy the music.
There’s also this netlabels catalogue which categorizes lots of netlabels by styles. I have found very interesting things there.
Hope you like something
Rachel
Thanks Pete – I’ve looked at that site before but something bothers me – I have to provide my credit card info before even seeing what they offer and if it’s worth it :/
Chrono Cr@cker – yes you can pay via Paypal but you have to have an iTunes account first, which requires an American credit card…..
Rachel
/Karen/ thanks for your thoughts as always
Copyright is a really grey area – did you know we can’t even hand out a copy of an old NZ newspaper article in class without writing to them and getting copyright clearance? In many cases, it’s ridiculous.
The law needs addressing… and fast.
Sid
Actually, recently I read some news where RIAA is pushing efforts to make it illegal to make a copy of a CD or make mp3 from a CD, something that has always been legal for backing-up purposes.
RIAA makes me very upset and sad. Do you guys have something like RIAA in New Zealand?
Rachel
We have RIANZ here. They had a massive campaign called BRN>BRNT – short for “Burn and get burnt” trying to stop people burning a copy of their CDs.
The crazy thing is, people *want* music. They enjoy it. They want it in the format they prefer. More formats = more opportunities to make money. If you offer different versions of the same product (e.g. the DVD and extended DVD) some people will buy both. Same goes for music. If you offer cool remixes only digitally, people will buy those too.
Trip
Hi Rachael,
Iâm a podcaster (new to the game) and there is a ton of people out there that provide readily available music without the need for a credit card.
I am a big fan of e-music but like you said, some people just donât like the whole credit card up front type deal.
The RIAA (SoundExchange) has completely screwed up access to legal music for Internet broadcasting; most notably download type access. Thus I moved to indies and unsigned artists. Anyone who is signed to a label I play by permission.
With podcasters you have to search for shows that donât get caught up with the other side of âclutterâ?. That being people podcasting music just to hear themselves talk.
You can pick up shows at podcast alley, podshow, podsafe music, garage band and podcast bunker just to name a few; all free of charge. I have found that garage band and podsafe is more for people who like to search for good music and the podcast outlets are more along the lines of searching for people who play good music.
Trip
SoundTrip
tarbandu
Rachel, some suggestions:
-be sanguine about eMusic, and at least do the 14-day Free Trial and see how meagre their song selection actually is, before signing up full-time. It’s nice that it offers files in ‘unrestricted’ format, but too much of their catalogue is composed of very obscure recordings, with a real scarcity of ‘mainstream’ tunes
-I’ve been using two Russian sites, allofmp3.ru and mp3search.com, for the last month and I’ve been very pleased with both. Using a DSL line, downloading a 5 – 6 MB, single track mp3 file takes
Paul
I am in a similar position to you here in South Africa. We are also waiting for the iTunes Store to open up here and could wait for a while. I noticed that Skype has done a deal with EMI recently to sell EMI music through a Skype store (or something like that) across territorial boundaries. If you are interested, I did a post on this on my other blog at http://wiredgecko.typepad.com/neuvo/2006/04/while_we_wait_f.html.
Really enjoying your blog (mine feels postively 90s in comparison).
Dom
“I have to provide my credit card info before even seeing what they offer and if it’s worth it :/”
Rachel, I know I’m late to this discussion but if you haven’t already figured it out, you *can* see what’s available on emusic without signing up with your credit card (there’s just no obvious direct link).
Try using this address:
http://www.emusic.com/browse/all.html
They’ve even got NZSO and Don McGlashan stuff! Choice!
Rachel C
Thanks Dom – yeah a few people emailed me a copy of that link and some kind person even sent me an itunes voucher!! I had to enter in an American address in order to redeem it though, crazy!
EgAr
Understand… You will be happy in our country(i mean russia), where you can write CD with whereaver you want music… You can’t copy music from friends cd’s without fear….
http://trance.ru – more free music
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[...] If you’re feeling extremely grateful, I would appreciate accept any iTunes vouchers (in New Zealand we cannot legally buy music for iPods – our credit cards/Paypal accounts aren’t accepted). [...]
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I’ve moaned about this before but bear with me. I’m so frustrated that iTunes hasn’t yet come to New Zealand. I’m a big music listener and frankly, I’m tired of listening to the radio while I commute. There’s just far too many ads. I love discovering new music and lately I’ve found that more and more music I like isn’t getting any airplay. When I’m online lately, I’ve been using last.fm and Pandora to discover new songs and artists.
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Bricolage Fantasy
Who needs iTune if you have Hypemachine and Elbo.ws?
half the planet have mp3 blog these days
http://elbo.ws/
http://hype.non-standard.net/