METAL BLADE FREE SAMPLER FAIL
MS contributor Corey Mitchell, ever the deal-hunter, emailed me yesterday about this free sampler that Metal Blade posted on Amazon featuring new music by great bands such as Between the Buried and Me, Primordial, In Solitude, Hate Eternal and more. I went through the whole process of downloading a new Amazon app (despite already having it), installing it, going back to the download page… only to be told the sampler wasn’t available in my territory. Zuh?
Then I realized I was on Amazon.co.uk, so I signed on to regular Amazon.com, searched for and successfully downloaded the sampler. It’s right here for those Americans who want it. But all Brits have to click the other link, above; Japanese folk can probably find it here, French people can presumably click here, Germans can download it here, and Chinese people… fucked if I know. Never mind if you’re Japanese, French, German or any other nationality but you speak English; no, no, no, Amazon will not allow you to download from the U.S. site! Never! Heresy! If you’re Metal Blade, this is a real concern since readers of MetalSucks come from all over the world.
And therein lies the problem; I bring this issue up not to pick on Metal Blade, of course (the same could be said of any release on any label), but to underscore the completely backwards state of our current digital distribution system.
This follows the same antiquited record label logic as staggering international release dates: completely fucktarded. The Internet is global: deal with it. Digital files, unlike physical items, are not limited by location. Users shouldn’t be made to go to a special gateway site for their country; instead, there should be one site — available in multiple languages via a drop-down menu (similar to how you login to UPS.com and FedEx.com) — that anyone in the world can visit to download anything they want. Release dates shouldn’t matter, because everything should be released on the same day worldwide; not doing so is leaving money on the table and forcing peoples’ hands towards illegal downloads, but I’ve already covered that topic at length.
Don’t feed me the standard line about how distribution deals lock labels into doing things a certain way; bullshit! Any shmuck with $30 and a TuneCore account can get their shitty local band’s music on every download service in the world, so why can’t the labels? Ditch your neanderthal distribution deals and do it yourself, because a digital distribution deal in 2011 is akin to hiring a horse and buggy to take you around town. Not to mention you’ll be earning more money this way because you won’t be paying a middle man.
Where things could get sticky with a global music distribution portal is with currency exchange. What would stop someone in a country where the currency is strong — let’s say the U.K. — from signing onto the language site of a country where the currency is weaker — say, India — and using Google Trnaslate to buy a record for pennies on the dollar? (uhh… pence on the rupee). Likewise, would people in smaller countries with weak currencies by forced to pay astronomical prices that are more consistent with the profits demanded by the nations producing the music? Perhaps music sales sites could use IP-targeting technology to determine location and charge a price consistent with that market.
Of course this is all just idle chatter because the concept of owning digital music files is fairly outdated in-and-of-itself. Soon enough we’ll all be streaming music from the cloud for one, low monthly price and we’ll never look back.
-VN
