“Jobs recommits to pan-Euro iTunes pricing”

I think the artist has to agree to a "download" distribution deal anyway. I bet that could have been made pan-European by default, but that is not in the labels interest. Divide and conquer.

If Britain joins the Euro-zone, the problem will go away you know;-) BTW Sweden uses their own currency so they are in the same boat as the Brits.

It may be true that recent contracts include terms requiring a separate download distribution deal, but that won’t be true of many thousands of contracts made prior to the advent of digital music distribution.

Also, I suspect that recent download distribution deals probably are negotiated on a Europe-wide (or even global) basis. I don’t think that recently released material is the major problem here; it’s the fact that the entire back-catalog needs to be picked through, first to find the licensing problems and then to solve them, which could take protracted negotiation and many years work.

The simplest change here would be for the E.U. to legislate such that contracts made in the past that stipulated territorial restrictions that would be illegal under single market rules should be construed to allow distribution anywhere in the European Union. That’s the simplest fix, and, O.K., it’s going to mean in some cases that two or more groups are entitled to Europe-wide distribution, which isn’t ideal but it’s where we’re at.

As for the Euro-zone, I actually don’t like the European Union; it seems to me to be the diametric opposite of what I’d like it to be. As such I don’t really want to see the U.K. becoming ever closer to just a small part of a federal Europe, which is what many of our European neighbours would love to see. I also don’t welcome the constant interference from (often unelected) officials in Brussels. Even the elected MEPs are pretty much invisible; I couldn’t tell you the name of my local MEP, or even the names of the various parties in the European parliament. And if I can’t, then I’d put money on most other people not knowing either, which means that even the elected officials are probably not really representing our wishes. Which isn’t terribly surprising as there’s next to no press coverage of them, so you would’t expect them to care very much what they do.

I suppose I feel that, in terms of values and culture, we’re much closer to the countries that make up the British Commonwealth and (to an extent) to the United States, and that we should proceed on that basis. I think a lot of our population would agree with that statement in general terms, and that’s one reason that our political masters leaders won’t let us vote on the subject. They don’t agree, so we don’t get a choice.