Big Trouble In Little... uhhhh... Japan...

There’s an interesting AP wire article out today that details a bit of drama concurrent with the launch of iTunes in Japan last week. It seems that Sony hasn’t yet done a deal with Apple, so there are no Japanese Sony artists in the new iTunes Japan store. So some of the Sony artists have broken ranks and attempted to release their catalogs to Apple directly.

For at least one musician, this means “they are no longer a Sony recording artist,” according to Sony. Of course, it is worth noting that a musician signed to a major technically has little or no control over the master use rights of his record, so of course the Sony artists that go this route are in blatant violation of their contract. Now, that said, I think what we’re seeing here is the Final Battle. I’m amused that it will be fought in Japan rather than the United States, but when this is done, there will be a new paradigm wherein the music retailers with the most power will no longer give a flying fuck about any other marketing.

For the people that run iTunes, they couldn’t really give two shits if you’re an indie or a major, if you’ve sold 10 records or 10,000,000. It’s enough that you’re there, because there’s no backstock that has to be dealt with. My recent Micronaut album takes up exactly the same shelf-space as Thriller and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. iTunes and MSN Music can stock pretty much every record sent to them, whereas even the big brick-n-mortar-n-drywall retailers can only have a relatively tiny percentage of all releases available at any one time, so they concentrate on those that actually sell.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. When indie labels can cut out their largest expense, which is production of the actual CD, they can concentrate more on promotion, and level the playing field a bit with the majors. While I vastly prefer the quality of a real CD, and like getting the cover art and liner notes in a nice printed package, it occurs to me that I haven’t bought a real album in almost two years. All my music purchases have been through either iTunes or Warp’s excellent Bleep service.