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drcuriosityThis started as an LJ comment but quickly turned into a rant, so I'll post it here in case anyone else feels like commenting/contributing.
I was talking with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ledaire and elissa_carey about my "current music" in the last post, and how damned hard to find it is around here. Licensing issue, or availability..?
<rant>
No licensing issues at all, as far as I know. Availability - New Zealand is one of those weird places that either has rare stuff all over the place or mildly uncommon stuff that's as rare as hen's teeth. Ironically with respect to FLA, Delerium CDs are pretty common - the same people making the music, but more "mainstream" appeal (and distribution via EMI rather than Metropolis), so it actually gets here.
As far as the big music publishing companies (or their NZ branches) are concerned, there's no profit margin in stuff that's not going to sell a lot of units, so they only ever get a few and most of those would never leave the Auckland area (where around a third of our population lives - on the other side of the country from me). And of course, since there isn't any available to listen to even casually, there's never much of a market for it. Catch-22. Taking the example above, Delerium only ever got play here because of that one song that had Sarah McLachlan in it.
Music is relatively expensive here, too. The prices ramped up citing our "weak exchange rate", but never lowered again when the exchange rate became a lot more favourable. New releases you can expect to pay around NZ$35 (US$22.62) for; older stuff typically goes for around NZ$25 (US$16.16), while for "specialist" imports - most of the stuff I'd like to be listening to - you're generally looking at NZ$45 (US$29.09) and up for something that'd cost US$10-$15. That's a bit more than just shipping and handling, even to this little backwater country on the far side of the Pacific.
</rant>
So, if anyone can come up with a good explanation for why we pay so much for a relatively limited selection of music here, I'd like to hear it.
I'm glad we've got a bit of decent local talent.
I was talking with
ledaire and elissa_carey about my "current music" in the last post, and how damned hard to find it is around here. Licensing issue, or availability..?<rant>
No licensing issues at all, as far as I know. Availability - New Zealand is one of those weird places that either has rare stuff all over the place or mildly uncommon stuff that's as rare as hen's teeth. Ironically with respect to FLA, Delerium CDs are pretty common - the same people making the music, but more "mainstream" appeal (and distribution via EMI rather than Metropolis), so it actually gets here.
As far as the big music publishing companies (or their NZ branches) are concerned, there's no profit margin in stuff that's not going to sell a lot of units, so they only ever get a few and most of those would never leave the Auckland area (where around a third of our population lives - on the other side of the country from me). And of course, since there isn't any available to listen to even casually, there's never much of a market for it. Catch-22. Taking the example above, Delerium only ever got play here because of that one song that had Sarah McLachlan in it.
Music is relatively expensive here, too. The prices ramped up citing our "weak exchange rate", but never lowered again when the exchange rate became a lot more favourable. New releases you can expect to pay around NZ$35 (US$22.62) for; older stuff typically goes for around NZ$25 (US$16.16), while for "specialist" imports - most of the stuff I'd like to be listening to - you're generally looking at NZ$45 (US$29.09) and up for something that'd cost US$10-$15. That's a bit more than just shipping and handling, even to this little backwater country on the far side of the Pacific.
</rant>
So, if anyone can come up with a good explanation for why we pay so much for a relatively limited selection of music here, I'd like to hear it.
I'm glad we've got a bit of decent local talent.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 01:38 pm (UTC)When looking at U.S. prices, I was going off the catalogues of Metropolis Records which stocks a lot of stuff I'd like to get, and a few local stores/vendors in San Francisco when I visited a couple of years back. Perhaps the market's different there from New York's.
And yes, we do get a lot of music, but almost nothing in the range that I really want - hence this post being a rant, rather than a well-thought-out balanced point of view :-)
As I said though, we either have rare stuff everywhere, or uncommon stuff nowhere to be found. I've wandered in to Echo Records to find a stack of copies (about a dozen) of a fairly rare Swedish Industrial CD marked down to NZ$7 (US$4.55) each because no-one knew who or what the hell they were, and thus no-one had bought them...