It's the 21st Century

[Gwinny]

A rant thread. It's the 21st century and I have a credit card, and I'm not allowed to purchase digital content from overseas Amazon affiliates. Or iTunes - and you can't even order UK, German, or French giftcards to make purchases anymore because they look at your IP address. (It makes me more upset when the musicians I'm interested in are on 'foreign' labels owned by the goliath UMG.)

"Nous sommes désolés. Nous n'avons pas pu traiter votre commande en raison de restrictions géographiques appliquées au produit que vous avez essayé d'acheter. Veuillez consulter les conditions d'utilisation de ce produit pour déterminer les restrictions géographiques applicables. Nous nous excusons pour la gêne occasionnée."

I can't read every word of that, but I comprehend enough to know it's bullshit. I guess I'm just going to order the CD, because the sinister powers-that-be don't care if the content is packaged up in a brown box and sent across the border, but God forbid it travel via network protocol.

You know, the album is also all over torrent sites, but I'm a law-abiding citizen.

[Shadowstorm]

That sucks. What artist/album is it, just out of curiosity?

Foreign independent labels often have US-based distributors. You can try to contact the label directly via their website and ask if a physical copy of the album you are looking for is being sold in the States.

But yeah, geographical-based restrictions on the Internet is a crock of shit.

[Gwinny]

It's Helmut Fritz's (or whatever his real name is) debut album En Observation. Sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound tantalizingly mysterious. It's just vapid techno-pop, not the works of Mozart or anything, but there are others with better and more studied tastes and they are suffering as well! I must speak for them! ;) I was going to grab a couple of the more catchy songs via digital download.

It's Sony Music France, so it's not obscure or independent. Oh well. I'm irked with the 'Establishment' or mafiaa or whatever the kids call it nowadays. Maybe I'll just go give Jonathan Coulton some more money.