Still Not In Your Country

Statistically, Americans do not travel. And this is why there is no rage about the geographical restrictions on electronic content services. The United States are bearing the critical market voting mass here and countries like the United Kingdom alone do not matter. 

In the old days, after buying a CD record, I could put it in a portable player, circle the globe and the music would continue playing uninterrupted. But these were the old days. Now we have changed the conduit - from physical discs to wireless streaming and suddenly we learn the hard way about the legal restrictions.

For a consumer, how is an ABBA song on a physical record different from the same song on a music streaming account? Yet there seems to be hell of a difference to the royalty collector (or the middlemen), such that they restrict where you can or cannot listen. Which probably is not a problem for those who do not change a zip code throughout their entire life. But once you start moving, you quickly hit a wall. In a most surprising moment, such as changing a plane one the way to your destination.

Of course this all can be circumvented, by applying VPNs and other techniques, which fool the software on both ends of the connection. But it should not be like that.

I have recently been setting up a Google Chromecast (with Google TV) and I realized I could not install certain popular video apps from the Play Store, as they were "not available in your country". After a lot of digging around I realized there was an old "payment profile", connected with another country, attached to my account and I had to delete it entirely.

This is all a huge legal mess, and despite promises and ideas, music (and media content) in general is far from "being like water". Water, fortunately, can be drunk (if available) by anyone, regardless of their credit card billing address.