iTunes Music Store Launches in 56 New Countries, Movies Arrive in Four
Earlier today, we noted that the iTunes Music Store had gone live in Russia and Turkey, but now that changes have propagated throughout iTunes and we've had time to collect reports, it now appears that Apple …
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch caps a year of deliberate geographic staging at Apple: the App Store went to 33 new territories back in July 2011, and in July 2012 Apple extended iTunes in the Cloud to over 35 new countries, building the licensing and infrastructure base that today's 56-store music rollout sits on.
The timing also answers a live question in the press cycle — TechCrunch flagged an iTunes event in Moscow on December 4 asking whether Russia would finally get the service, and the store going live there a day early resolves it. The pickup across Bloomberg, Engadget, ZDNet, paidContent and others shows how much weight analysts put on storefront geography: Bloomberg's framing was that iTunes alone would rank among the world's biggest media companies.
First-order effects
- Apple instantly gains legal download storefronts in 56 new markets including Russia and Turkey, converting users who previously had no licensed iTunes access into potential paying customers.
- Music labels and, in the four new movie markets, studios now have negotiated distribution deals live in those territories — the catalog rights work behind this launch was already done before today.
Second-order effects
- Local and regional digital-music services in markets like Russia and Turkey now compete against Apple's integrated device-plus-store bundle, forcing them to differentiate on price or local catalog rather than availability.
- Each newly opened store deepens the installed base that makes future content categories viable there — the same sequencing Apple used when it moved from App Store expansion into the Cloud movies rollout earlier in 2012.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — App Store in 2011, Cloud movies mid-2012, music stores now — Apple's playbook is to treat every country as eventually addressable, making storefront presence a function of licensing negotiation speed rather than strategy shifts.
- For emerging markets, the structural effect is that Apple's entry sets a de facto benchmark for what licensed digital media costs and how it is sold, shaping negotiations between local rights holders and every other streaming or download entrant that follows.
The trend: Apple is executing a staged, licensing-gated conversion of iTunes from a Western storefront into default global digital-media infrastructure, one country batch at a time.