iTunes Event Taking Place In Moscow On Dec 4: Is Russia Finally Getting Apple's Music Service?
At long last, Apple appears to be approaching a launch date for iTunes in Russia — and it could come as soon as tomorrow. A tipster has forwarded us an email, in Russian …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Moscow event caps a December in which Apple's international machine went into overdrive: the iTunes Music Store went live in 56 new countries, with Russia and Turkey named among them, while the iPhone 5 rolls out to South Korea on December 7, China on December 14, and more than 50 additional markets across the month. The tipster email pointing to a December 4 event remains unconfirmed by Apple, but the store-side confirmation means the question is less whether Russia gets iTunes than how Apple stages it.
The breadth of pickup — CNET, MacRumors, 9to5Mac, iMore and others all carrying the story the same day — reflects how long Russia had been the conspicuous gap in iTunes' map, and how much of Apple's hardware momentum now depends on filling content gaps in exactly these markets.
First-order effects
- Russian consumers gain a licensed storefront for music on the devices they already own, converting a market where Apple sold hardware without a content catalog into one where the iPhone and iPad ship with a working purchase pipeline.
- Local rights holders and distributors get an Apple-negotiated channel into their own market, with Apple's standard revenue split setting the reference price for digital music sales in rubles.
Second-order effects
- Any domestic download or streaming service competing for Russian music buyers now faces Apple's catalog and pricing power head-on, forcing a response on price or exclusives rather than on mere availability.
- A live iTunes store raises the resale pitch for the iPhone 5's December push into 50-plus countries — hardware launches and content availability are being sequenced together, and rivals without a matching store must sell devices on specs alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple treats content-store entry as the precondition for hardware expansion in emerging markets, making licensing deals with local labels the quiet bottleneck that determines which countries get iPhones with full ecosystems next.
The trend: Apple is decoupling its growth from mature markets by pairing each hardware rollout wave with same-season iTunes store launches, turning content licensing into the gating step for entering new countries.