Thursday, October 05, 2006

Telkom, Microsoft and Record Labels

How much longer can these people hold us to ransom in South Africa? Is it not time to speed things up? Move things along? Increase productivity and make all of us have a better life? I haven't even mentioned the prices yet....

The XBox 360 has now been on sale in South Africa for just short of a week. How many of those 1st buyers have tried and failed to log onto their Xbox Live Silver account that they got for free with thier purchase? Microsoft say that there is no South African option because of the lack of bandwidth. I say that I am willing to try. At LEAST let me use the VoIp to talk to people. At least let me purchase upgrades and small fun games. At least give me the option. Who are you to tell me what to do?

Wait, as soon as they find a fault in the XBox 360, and you know they will, Bill and the gang will give us access very quickly. How else are we supposed to install the security patches?

After a long time, I have recently brushed off the dust on my iPod and downloaded the new iTunes software that is actually quite neat. TV, Movies, Radio, Podcasts, all are there. How many of these great things can I download? JUST THE PODCASTS. Apple say that the record labels in South Africa haven't given them the go-ahead to allow us to download songs. I think that someone needs to do thier damn job! I WANT to download songs. I don't want to go to a CD shop and buy a CD. I don't want to go to Musica and purchase THIER songs. I want my songs for my player when I want it!

Who are you tell me differently?

I think that if Apple are willing to sent me a glorified CD player, the least they can do is make sure that I can get the Tuesday Free Song that I see every week, but NOOOOO, I am not important enough to get even that.

So what do we do? We go the illegal route. Not me, but other people. We download our songs from file-sharing programmes, we copy and paste, we rip and share. At this moment in time, South African musicians are planning a concert to raise awareness of pirated music and movies. What is the bet that the CD that gets released to coincide with the concert will be online in a couple days, if not hours.

Another way of getting around the "No South Africa" problem, is to give your mate's UK or US address, then all is great. My question is why? WHY? MAKE IT HAPPEN!!!!

How? I have no idea. Maybe you do?

2 comments:

Marc said...

Hey Jon,
Cool Blog !!
I agree, not being able to download from ITunes is ridiculous. They sell the product in the country, they should at least allow you to have a login. A brilliant new feature of ITunes 7 is that it will download the Album Art for you, BUT, you have to have an account ? Eish

Anonymous said...

Hey Jon


I agree - cd shops suck and and Apple just wont let us download.In the mean time just use www.allofmp3.com