The Jitunes conspiracy!
Slashdot story: “The Insanely Great Songs Apple Won’t Let You Hear“….”Slate.com has an article by Paul Collins explaining that the iTunes music store has thousands of tracks that you can’t buy in the U.S. From the article: ‘The iTunes Music Store has a secret hiding in plain sight: Log out of your home account in the page’s upper-right corner, switch the country setting at the bottom of the page to Japan, and you’re dropped down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of great Japanese bands that you’ve never even heard of.
The problem is that you must make your order using a credit card with a Japanese billing address to order through the Japan’s iTunes Music Store: the J-iTunes conspiracy!
However, using a prepaid “gift” card—iTunes Music Card from Apple Japan—rabid JPop fans get access to Japan’s top music right on their computers. This loophole, has created a cottage industry of people in Japan buying iTunes Music Cards and selling them to hardcore Japanese music fans all over the world.
This has been such a spiffy niche market that even my good buddy, Mr. G, who lives way down at the end of the earth in New Zealand sent me this email urging me to get in on the “boom”:
On 1/29/07, Mr. G wrote:
No songs for you! The story of the Japanese iTunes Store and American customers Arstechnica.com and original Slate.com article.
Might be a sweet and easy gig selling Jitunes cards to US otaku geeks?
It is a sweet idea and not very expensive for overseas folks. Those Japanese iTunes Music Cards come in denominations of 1500 yen and 3000yen are already being sold by the 3Yen’s kind sponsor, J-List, for only $18 / $35. This is a damn fair price when you figure in the credit card and handing costs and the peace of mind dealing with an business like J-List who has been selling online for almost a decade. Those iTunes music cards from Japan is fully compatible with iTunes and iPods from any country. As they say in Japanese, “Cho-beri goo da na!” (Extremely-very good, ain’t it?)
Actually, I saw iTMS—the iTunes Music Store of Japan scam about a day after it went up on Slate, and then watched it make the rounds, of from Slashdot, Arstechnica to digg.com. These JiTunes cards have got to be popular the J-Pop otaku because the jlist.com servers have melting down from the overload of new customers trying to buy the JiTunes cards before Apple tries to close the loophole, hee, hee.
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February 1st, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Shit.
There isn’t much J-Pop worthy of buying–It all sucks.
For all the years I’ve lived in Japan I HAVE TO listen to the radio every day driving to my clients’ offices. Every thing I hear is shit —there are no “insanely great” songs in Japan that being hidden from the rest of the world. Japanese music boils down to either Euro-copy-crap of fake loopy techo beats, and juvenile cute-ish pop game-machine music. Puke.
February 1st, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Ah, the lovely rancid scent of conspiracy. Sadly, there isn’t one here. At least not on Apple’s side of the fence. It’s the music labels that set the rules for where songs can and can’t be sold. Incidentally, the same loophole works for every country’s version of the store, not just Japan.
As far as music worth buying goes, some people like a trip to the dentist, some people like J-Pop.
February 2nd, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Au contraire…If you exclusively listen to J-Pop music you won’t “a trip to the dentist” ’cause it’s sugar-free, 100% pure saccharine.
February 3rd, 2007 at 12:23 am
I concede the artificial sweetener/dental hygiene point. Perhaps I should have used another analogy: Some people enjoy being covered in hot candle wax, some people enjoy J-Pop. Or maybe: Some folks enjoy being set on fire while spiny worms burrow through their ear drums and rabid wolverines tear out their fingernails, some folks like J-Pop.
February 6th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Using the gift cards to access iTunes Japan from outside of Japan has been going on for a while. Apple probably doesn’t care because they get paid either way. But the Japanese labels want to control everything (look at their attacks on You Tube), so it might not be long until they force Apple to crack down. Especially when huge websites are now sharing this “secret” with the masses.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Yep, I love sharing such “secrets” with the masses.
Better yet, I like this idea for converting MP3s from iTunes purchased and copy protected AAC files…. the following software strips out the iTunes copy-protection without effecting the MP3 quality. Oh, I’m so evil, hee, hee.