Thursday, June 4, 2009

But I WANT to give you money!

I'm an honest person. I download tv shows to watch online, but if there is a movie I want to keep, or an album I want, I buy them. Especially so if the album is by an independent artist. I even downloaded an album from a website, that didn't require payment in advance. I listened to the album, really enjoyed it, decided to keep it, and went back and paid for it. I never received an acknowledgement from the not-known-outside-his-local-bar-scene artist, but that's a different rant altogether.

Today I came across an album that I wanted to download. I went through the whole payment procedure, came to "billing address" and started filling in my Israeli information. I selected "Israel" from the drop-down menu for country. Everytime I hit enter, up came an error message stating that my zip code didn't match my state.

Fine. I finally sent an email to Amazon and got this response:
At this time music downloads are only available to customers using a credit or debit card issued by a U.S. bank with a U.S. billing address...You also must be physically located in the U.S. at the time of purchase.
Well, okey dokey then. I understand distribution rights and whatnot, so I'm not too surprised by that. But please explain to me why they would have a drop-down menu with numerous countries listed if you can only be in one country?

A global world demands global accessability, but no one will let me buy this CD. If it were an independent artist, I would download it from a torrent, and send the artist a cheque. In this case, it's not, there's nowhere to send a cheque to. So sadly, the simple fact of living b'aretz, in the Land, means I shall have to find another *cough* means of *cough* accessing this CD.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I would have sworn you were talking about an Israeli website!

How about iTunes?

Unknown said...

Sadly, iTunes is the same. You have to specify your country, and as soon as you put anything other than US, the menu changes from everything to just apps.

My sister, who also lives here, has a US credit card with a US billing address (our billing address on our Canadian card is Israel) and she is able to use iTunes.