British songstress Kate Walsh’s new album Tim’s House was released a few a weeks ago and peaked at number one in the UK iTunes Store, so it piqued my curiosity when I heard that she would be performing her first-ever headlining gig in the United States this evening at a small club just around the corner from me in Hollywood. Her brand of quiet folk music had the entire audience mesmerized, including me, for the entire length of her forty-five minute solo acoustic set.
So I get home just now and I can’t wait to get my hands on her new album, but upon firing up the iTunes Store, all I can find is her previous two year old release. Did I misunderstand? Had it not yet been released? And if it wasn’t out yet, how on earth did it reach number one on the UK charts? Then it occurred to me that “UK charts” was the operative phrase there, so I changed over to the UK iTunes Store and found her new album right away.
One little problem: if you live in the US, or for that matter anywhere in the world outside of the UK, don’t bother trying to download it. Listen to the free samples, sure. But try to give iTunes the ten bucks (er, £5.49) to buy the album? Nope, sorry, not unless you’ve got a credit card with a UK billing address. Just to make sure I’m not losing it, I flip back to the US iTunes Store, and sure enough, it’s definitely not there.
Funny enough, it’s available here in the US from Amazon, if I want to engage in the quaint little outdated practice of having a physical CD shipped to me so I can waste time ripping it into iTunes on my own computer. But who still buys music that way? Okay, so I’m told that ninety percent-plus of all music buyers still do, but not in my universe.
Ironically, just this afternoon I was commenting that these days the only role physical CDs serve in my life are as collector’s items. I grabbed a copy of I Trust You To Kill Me so I could get Rocco DeLuca and The Burden to autograph it after their gig at Starbucks in Santa Monica, and it’ll go on the wall with the other autographed CDs I’ve collected over past few years. Nevermind that I’ve already owned the digital version of the album since before I interviewed Rocco back in April, I bought the physical CD today because it’s something that can be written on with a marker. That’s all that physical CDs mean to me these days. I’m certainly not interested in acquiring a physical CD for the purpose of listening to it; that’s what the iTunes Store is for.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind buying a physical CD when I encounter an indie band who’s still so undiscovered that they’re selling self-made CD-R’s at a gig because they don’t yet have the wherewithal to find their way into the iTunes Store. But when an album has already hit number one in the UK and the record label doesn’t see fit to make it available for download in the US, something’s not right.
A little digging reveals that Kate has released her latest album on her own indie label, meaning that there’s no big bad record label to blame here. I don’t know what the problem is. But here in 2007, shouldn’t we collectively be past the stage where an album goes on sale digitally for users with a billing address in one country and not another?
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