http://smmeyer.com/scribble/?p=77
Let me get this straight – the iTunes Store for South Africa doesn’t sell tunes? Duh! Wasn’t that the whole point of iTunes? What a rotten apple this is!
A visit to this “so-called” music store revceals that all we miserable bastards in South Africa can download is useless utilities and other crap that won’t even work on a “normal” iPod. This App Store has so far only offered me shit for an iPod Touch or iPhone – neither of which I own or will ever own anytime soon. Not even a single game is available for my iPod.
Someone said the lack of music was due to local laws – so yet another fine thing to be grateful for from those arseholes in Pretoria! I love you guys so, so much!
Does anyone know of an alternative to iTunes for purchasing cheap music online?
4 Comments
I doubt that it’s got anything to do with local laws, since we can use just about any other music store, and we’ve even had a local online mp3 store or two as well (musica used to sell mp3s for a while – not sure if they still do).
Some places to try are http://www.amazon.com, which sell nearly all their albums as mp3s as well, and is possibly the place I’d use (buying whole albums is cheaper than buying single mp3s, by the way), or http://www.emusic.com (which is a subscription service, and when I used it had a limited collection of music compared to places like amazon).
Ooh! And AFAIK itunes still sells music using their DRM technology, while neither Amazon or emusic do.
Bittorrent
It boils down to legal reasons. Basically, iTunes is a distributor. In the music industry, the labels sign (often exclusive) distribution rights with various companies – sometimes with their competitors – for distribution. Thus, iTunes (and in fact some web video sites etc) can only distribute to specific countries etc.