mutha$%&@# say what?!
What. Is. The. Point.
Of selling dance music (already a niche f*$%ing market) ON THE INTERNET if you’re going to RESTRICT SALES BY GEOGRAPHY?!?!?!?! And moreover, if there’s a song that I’m not “geographically eligible” to purchase, WHY WOULD YOU PRESENT IT TO ME FOR AUDITIONING, AND PUT A BUTTON MARKED “BUY” NEXT TO IT?!?!
Quoth TJIC: “Rope.”
Friday, October 10th 2008 at 9:08 am
The point is so you understand that many merchants still struggle to restrain free trade by entering exclusivity agreements.
I don’t know who or where you are but I live in Canada and I have to put up with stuff like this every day because many American companies will not sell to me in Canada. If they are manufacturers it’s often because they have Canadian subsidiaries selling here at inflated prices.
If they are middlemen they are often as frustrated as me. I had a nice chat some months ago with a fellow in Virginia who wanted to sell me furniture at 1/2 the price, even with shipping, that I could buy it here. We did the deal and I had it delivered to a shipper in a Montana border town and had to drive 100 kilometers round trip to pick it up. Worth it for big ticket items. Three cheers and a free plug for the Montana Shipping Outlet, Eureka, Montana.
Do businessmen ever understand that the attraction to socialism for the average Joe comes too often from the idiocies and greed of the business community?
Friday, October 10th 2008 at 10:55 am
I live in Somerville, MA, USA. There’s an Ikea coming to my neighborhood next year, so we’re going to have a different kind of furniture-related hassle than the one you described.
I can understand the potential allure of an exclusivity arrangement in the general case, particularly for products that are difficult to reproduce and/or costly to transport. But in the case of electronically-distributed, unpopular music, it’s hard to even imagine an edge case where exclusivity does anything except harm the producer, the merchant, and the consumer. Short term, long term, just harm harm harm all the way down. Here I am trying to pay money for a product I will *never* see in a store, or even likely *hear of* ever again, and they’re more worried about the extra $5 they’d make if I devoted my life to finding this track on vinyl?
That strategy indicates an unrealistic optimism about how badly I want to own a recording of their music.