“Old-fashioned red tape is delaying the eagerly awaited European launch of Apple Computers’ Internet music store iTunes, a company official said on Saturday. A maze of licensing contracts, music release dates that differ by country and incompatible billing systems have combined to sidetrack the service, which many recording executives still hope will make its European debut in the first half of 2004,” Bernhard Warner reports for Reuters.
“‘We will be here this year. I’m not going to announce the date at this time, but we are working very hard,’ Eddy Cue, vice president of applications and Internet services for Apple, said at the annual MidemNet music conference on the French Riviera,” Warner reports.
Full article here.
Good to hear that they are working hard and now we have a deadline for this minimum 1.7.2004 (and maximum 31.12.2004).
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” /> There is so much to buy.
I can wait till that. If I continue to save this rate I will easily hit that $25 000 =) to be the number one buyer in iTMS
Hey, One guy from Finland:
Can you and your EU buddies get it together or not? What’s the hold up?
Can you explain how the more enlightened EU seem inexplicably inept in allowing the public access to purchase online music?
Maybe you guys need to call in the French policed to direct traffic at the conference.
Yeah, that�s the ticket!
It’s funny because alot of the posts I read about the Euro iTMS were complaining about Apple taking their time but now its becoming very clear that it’s not Apple but the damn music companies. It’s ridiculous that they are making them jump through all these hoops just to get the music online. The great part is that once they get their music on the iTMS they are basically writing their own death notices b/c the artists will soon realize that they don’t have to rely on the industrial gorillas to move their music to the public.
Matt:
Help me out here. iTunes is going great guns in U.S.A.
Apparently, music companies in the States have not held up online music purchasing.
So, what makes the music business so different across the Atlantic?
I suspect it has less to do with business than those in elected office.
I think that even tho it is the European Community now there are still a lot of legacy by products from Europe being made up of so many countries. The US is after all just one country and that made things much simpler. Give the EU a break meat of moose.
If you remember, Jobs said in his interviews after the iTMS was released in the U.S. that the hardest part of getting the thing released was not the development but the record companies actually succumbing to an alternative means of distribution. One in which they didn’t have complete control over. It took Apple over 1 1/2 years to complete the negotiations with the record companies here in the U.S. so you’re point of them not holding it up is a little bit off. Now that they see the public response and the success of the iTMS they’re opening up to everyone.
I can’t speak to what the Euro music industry is like, but I’m sure the negotiations are 10x more difficult because they are dealing with different countries and different laws. You’re point is well taken about the public officials but, judging by all the news and reports about it I have to suspect that the delay is just the record companies being paranoid and difficult.
It’s not just the music companies…. easy to blame them. It’s the ARTISTS and their contracts with sometimes different labels in each country. There will need to be individual stores for France, Germany, England, Italy, Finland, etc. There cannot be a single store for Europe.
meat of moose?
The problem is that although Europe is supposed to be one country for trade ( The EU ) in reality the music business and its licensing with music artists is different for each EU country. Thus to have a European itunes Apple has had to arrange all the royalty deals etc. with each country in the EU separately. Now if Apple had to do the same for each state in America how long would it have taken itunes USA to arrive.
But for all the legal nightmare it is at least great that they are working it all out, just imagine what would have happened if Apple decided to hold of on a USA itunes until Europe, Asia, South America etc. etc. were all sorted out at once.
pkradd, good point about the Artists. There are individual contracts that are involved. I would say though, for the sake of this discussion that when we say “Record Companies” we should thing in terms of the whole ball of wax. There are hundreds of issues we could bring up but the bottom line is that 98% of what needs to be done is dependant on the labels getting their acts together. Good point about the Artists again though. I really didn’t think about them having individual deals with various labels in different countries. This whole thing must be a nightmare for the people at Apple who are working on the negotiations.
Jack:
My point exactly. The difficulty of getting something done is 10 to the power of “the number of committees times the number of members of each committee”.
If there were no EU some people in Europe could be jammin’ instead of slammin’ and sighin’ instead of cryin’.
pkradd:
What makes artists in the U.S.A. different from artists in Europe?
As you have correctly pointed out it revolves around contracts, and contracts are tied to litigation, and litigation and is tied up in law, and law is written by those in elected office. See, we are right back to square one.
Yes, I am glad that I can choose to download music if I want, when I want, and where I want.
How about the holdup in our northern neighbor, Canada? iTMS isn’t available there yet – because of licensing problems. You’d think that such problems would get sorted out quickly so that Canadian artists and music publishers could jump on the iTMS bandwagon and stop (or lessen) the illegal downloading of music. Isn’t it in everyone’s best interest to make music easy to obtain legally???
Bill:
The only thing I can attribute to the delay in Canada is because Apple is so tied up with Europe. Really. I have no idea why it’s taking so long for them. I think, and correct me if i’m wrong, but they’re industry is setup similar to ours.
Bill:
90% of all Canadians live within 100 miles of U.S.A.
Tell your buddies in Canada to make friends in the U.S and bring their iPod.
Hey, we can start iPod refugee centers in every state that borders Canada. “Bring me your tired and huddled masses who wanna jam on their iPods.”
I can see it now. The new statue of liberty with her iPod and her in-ear headphones. Sniff, sniff. Sorry, guys, I gotta go blow my nose.
It took Apple over a year to get labels/artists to agree to iTMS for the USA. It was not easy for the reasons mentioned by many posters. In European countries there are local artists who are not favorites of other countries and they need to be available on a per country basis in iTMS as well. US artists tend to be more popular world-wide (as do British performers). It’s just a lot of negotiations with lawyers, music publishers, etc. in each territory. I also think that Apple may be aiming to get at least 5 or 6 stores on line simultaneously rather then spreading them out. There is also the fact that computer “farms” will be needed for each country – most likely located in that particular country to run iTMS. It isn’t cheap. All in all I’d say the record companies, artists and Apple all want this to happen. It will by summer I suspect.
pkradd:
Are you saying that every online music store (iTunes, Napster, MusicMatch, etc.) each had to make its own set of deals individually with each label company and each artist before tunes are made available for the U.S. public?
Shivers! Tell your buddies from France to Finland not to hold their breaths.
Meat:
That’s right. Although they don’t have to make deals with every artist. Only the bigger ones or the ones who have such terms explicitly laid out in their contracts with the Record company.
Matt:
Let’s see. With iTunes I (the seller) can allow you (the buyer) to choose any song or album you want. I don’t have to burn any CD’s for you, maintain a huge CD inventory, and you can mix songs on your own CD.
How is it that giving consumers a choice such a difficult thing for sellers to understand and accept? This online music thing seems to be a no-brainer and a win-win situation. I kinda thought the happy customers make happy sellers. Ouch, the thought of all these people being happy makes my head hurt.
Meat:
That’s not the point. We all know that making the music available for download is a no-brainer. iTunes proved that the demand is very high. The point is, even though it makes perfect sense to us, the record companies are greedy. They want full control of the process, just like before. So, they are going to squeeze every nickel out of the contract and are going to make sure that the process is lucrative for them and not the services. They won’t do it if they aren’t getting the type of revenue they are used to.
The other issue is piracy. You know as well as I do that they are hesitant to do it because of Napster and Kazaa and how much business they “supposedly” lost. That and the money issue are the two main sticking points in the whole process.
Matt:
Absolutely. I was being sarcastic.
The seller and/or artist would rather you buy an entire CD with 4 crappy tunes for every decent tune.
Lousy, lazy, greedy bastard. Ooops, did I say that?
Meat of Moose:
Sadly, because of the way the music industry works, it is possible for an artist to have five different record companies and the songwriters to have five different publishing arrangements protected by five different mechanical copyright bodies (who are probably the people who are causing the most grief).
With few exceptions, the artists probably want to iTMS up and running! The record companies all seem to want iTMS sooner rather than later. Neither of these are surprising – they’re both losing money to illegal downloads hand over fist.
But the mechanical copyright organisations, like MCPS/PRS (UK) and ASCAP/BMI/SESAC (USA), which represent songwriters have always used the introduction of new technology as a means to leverage a greater position of advantage for the songwriters they [B]CLAIM[/B] to represent.
The usage of the word CLAIM is key: many artists – including major acts like U2 – see the mechanical-copyright organisations as unnecessary middlemen who add little value to the industry and have taken action to remove such bodies from the administration of their affairs.
Now, whilst it is true that successive generations of copyright law – demanded by rights holders – have created the need for such a complex regime of rights collection, it should be noted that the governments are not responsible for the way in which those rights societies conduct themselves as they are invariably private limited liability companies owned by their membership.
The USA benefits from being one large market with rights protected by several organisations, with some duplication. The UK has very little duplication or competition, but sadly – by assessing Europe as a single entity – Apple places itself in the position where it needs to agree rights with the artist, the artist’s record company (potentially two or three), the publishing rights organisation for each country (30??), the artists’ performing rights organisation (another 30?) and – as a new addition – the session musician’s perfoming rights organisation (another 30).
So, Apple probably has to draw up some 90 rights agreements plus an agreement for each national entity of every record label (which could easily be anywhere between 2500 to 12000 separate agreements) just to ship iTMS on a Europe-wide basis, and the sad thing is that its probably the 90 who are holding up the 12000.
MCCFR:
What keeps the artists and songwriters from going independent?
Man, I see a new dawn approaching and the pioneers who will be blazing the trails.
Tell the recalcitrant 90 the old days are over. We’re bustin’ loose.
Just my opinion, but I think the mess is because EU is full of bureaucratic red tape. On one hand, they want to unify their foreign policies, monetary units, economic markets, etc., but OTOH, they want sovereignty for each of the old members. The two are sometime incompatible. Why can UK et al. keep their old currency while the new members will have to convert to Eurodollar? Then there are a lot of baggage from the old rules/laws. The Euro recording industry only amplifies that.
The unification has been going on for decades and it will require more decades to complete. Intercourse among nations is just as slow as that among the turtles. It is interesting for politicians, but for ordinary people who want to see results immediately, it’s boring as hell.
MoM:
But isn’t that exactly what U2 tried to do with MCPS or somesuch? The problem is that these bodies have the weight of the Berne Convention behind them.
These conventions – and bodies like WIPO – were and are the creatures of rights-holders, whether for music, books, engineering etc. If you want your nation-state to be considered a ‘card-carrying’ member of the ‘modern’ commercial world, you have to be a signatory of the Berne Convention.
So now the rights-holders have established a common model for managing copyright on a worldwide basis, and every modification to Berne for the purposes of the music industry has advanced the claims of the various interest groups: songwriters, performers, session artists. Absurdly – given the way music is being produced – it’s only a matter of time before the guitar technician and the sampler operator/synth programmer manage to convince WIPO that they form a valid creative community and another rights-collection agency has to be formed in every nation.
As I imply, the successful artists are the ones who land up paying for this nonsense: the rights organisations are front-end loaded i.e. they take all of their money up front (including a reasonable surplus for a ‘rainy day’) from the successful artists, whilst a fringe artist gets all of the benefit of not having to negotiate rights with 100,000 radio stations for the benefit of a cheque for $100 every six months, two years in arrears.
So whilst you could argue that the problem is governmental, because of the nature of WIPO and Berne, it’s actually far more accurate to state that the complexity occurs because no two interest groups in a given country are willing to trust each other enough to work together.
In any sane universe and given modern IT systems, there would be ONE rights collection agency in any ONE country which managed the distribution of funds dependent on an contract between all the interest groups recognised by WIPO for any given collection of work which is in force for any work released into the public domain until superceded by a subsequent agreement. That way, if I’m Brian Eno expecting a lot of sync rights, I’ll simply sign an agreement giving the majority of rights to the performing rights society. But if I’m Paul McCartney expecting to be covered to death, but I no longer get a lot of radio play, I’ll give the majority of my income to the mechanical rights end.
MCCFR:
Dude, you are too deep for me.
I never gave up my rights to any human being. You still have not provided any argument why one person, two persons, whatever can’t – independently – make a deal to put their music online.
God help us all if the independent artist becomes the slave of bureaucracy.
MoM:
Money. There’s your reason.
If an artist wants to get heard (and seen) it will usually look to signing with a record label to provide the ‘mechanics’ of the process: distribution, marketing, design and production of their product. This brings rights management companies into the frame also, as they’ll want a piece of the pie – and offer the artist inducements to ‘manage’ their music [guaranteed royalty payments, copyright protection, legal counsel, etc].
And of course the record label wants a return for their investment – and will protect their ‘rights’ vigorously [artist advance, ‘brand’ development, licencing agreements, etc].
All of the major labels have an outmoded business model – one developed during the ‘heyday’ of rock & roll, where music and artists were a commodity [it’s still around today] and for the most part have been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century with great reluctance. They are in denial – of the reality of how modern music is [can be] made and distributed without them.
They want to maintain their hegemony…. and their profit margins.