This week’s post isn’t meant so much to be informative, as to ask a question.
I am hoping that somebody out there is an international copyright expert, because I’m trying to find out why it is so difficult to find music published abroad here in the United States.
I’ll tell you what I mean. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument that I’m trying to find the latest album by the group Jennifer Rostock (I know, it sounds like it’s a solo artist, but they’re actually a really good band). I start out hoping to get a hard copy, as I’m something of a Luddite, so I go to Amazon. Nope, they’re not there, and if they are, a new copy is $58 not including shipping. So, I go to Barnes & Noble, Borders, and most of the mass music retailers out there. Nothing. Okay, fair enough. They’re faceless corporations that care as much about music as I do about discount rates used in the pudding industry. I’m not picky. I’ll get a digital copy to save on shipping costs. iTunes tells me flat out that, despite the fact that they have Jennifer Rostock in their library, they’re not allowed to sell it to me here in the United States. Figuring it might just be an issue with iTunes, I go to the download store at Amazon.de (the German version of what we’re all familiar with). Again, they tell me to get lost as I’m not in Germany. Ultimately, my only option is to buy the CD from Germany, and suffer the insult and indignity of a $15 shipping and handling charge (which is still far less than that insulting $58 from Amazon in the U.S.).
I could be wrong, but I thought that one of the great advantages of the digital age was that borders would become irrelevant to commerce, and that digital transmission of data (including music) would mean that excess costs like printing, packaging, and shipping could be eliminated forever. This should be a great new age where artists from around the world can distribute their work anywhere without having to suffer the expense of printing out hundreds or thousands of CDs and shipping them hither and yon. Instead, here we are in the second decade of the 21st Century, and we are still facing the same distribution limits that we did 30 years ago.
Well, I take that back. 30 years ago, we weren’t aware of music produced elsewhere in the world (except in the UK, of course), so we didn’t know what we were missing. Now, we are aware of this music, but we still can’t get it.
So, I have been thinking about this conundrum, and I have played out various scenarios in my mind. Perhaps it’s that music publishers do not want to have to spend the money to market their bands in countries where they don’t believe they would have any appeal. I could have understood this 10 years ago, when music was only distributed by CD, cassette, or album, and publishing and shipping costs would have been prohibitive unless a certain return on the investment could be reasonably expected. But, as far as I know, there is no additional incremental cost for selling a digital copy of a song in Uzbekistan over selling it in the United States. Even if only 5 copies are sold, that is 5 additional copies that cost nothing to produce or distribute.
All I can think of is that there is some sort of copyright exposure for certain artists trying to distribute their work overseas. I wouldn’t have thought this would be true, after all some artists send their work overseas all the time and are apparently covered by copyright laws – except maybe in China. But, does it entail some sort of extra incremental cost to copyright your work internationally instead of simply in your home country?
These are only the random speculations of a fevered mind, and they have no basis in any understanding of international copyright law. I am hoping that somebody who reads this knows more on the subject than I do, and can offer me some insights. If there are no good legal reasons why international music cannot be distributed in the United States, perhaps it’s time for a company to focus some energy on opening up international artists to American consumption. At the very least, perhaps it’s time for international publishers and distributors to open up the sluices and take away their silly regional restrictions on distribution.
