No, there's a problem underlying: how do you define a release?
To me a release is the physical cd which is boild so to be sold in a
market: a brasilian release has portuguese liner notes and a Eu
reelase has what it is needed to be sold in EU. I mean, if the same
identical phisical cd is sold in two different country, for me it's
same release.
A release is the combination of the "thing where the music is on" and
the market were it is available. If it was only the physical CD then
we wouldn't need release countries at all.
So it's a combination of which record is available where and when. If
"when " and "which" are the same for 2 records, then you can merge the
where to a release area for this record.
Perfect. We have two idea of what a release is and I guess your is the
MB one.
Yes, I think so. To be very precise, I think that a release of a record is
an _event_ on a _market_. A release is an economic entity.
And the problem is that the recording industry and their marketers do not
follow clear rules for their division of markets. They do follow the
gregorian calender, therfore fixing the time of the event is easy and
standardized, but markets evolve.
A few years ago, national borders and customs rules were strict enough to
allow us to say: A market is more or less equal to a nation state.
But with globalization this gets tricky. If a record is released in
France, then anybody can move a ton of them over to Germany and sell them
there without having to deal with customs. So within the EU the national
boundaries do not define markets anymore.
I believe that most record companies still divise their markets along the
lines of national boundaries. There are many reasons, like different
language etc, but it is not a necessity anymore.
To be very precise the common market is currently called "European
Community", is a part of the European Union, and will be renamed to
"European Union" once the constitution gets ratified. It is the successor
of the "European Economic Community". The EEC is of historical interest
only. Since I do not think there were actual _releases_ for the whole EEC
market, we could skip it. The (sub-)continent Europe does not qualify as a
market at all.
Now, is this a reason to add the EU (or currently EC) to the list of
markets?
I am not sure. If we do, we would probably have to add the European
Economic Area (EEA) (between the EC, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein),
Mercosur, etc etc. Do we want that? Wikipedia is pretty strict and says
that we only have three single markets right now
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_market>):
- European Community
- European Economic Area
- Caribbean Community single market
OK that could help. Three new markets.
However, nothing guarantees that record companies really make full use of
the common market. They might very well have terms or release that divide
the common market.
It all boils down to this:
Are there distributors which really _use_ the common market of the EU for
their releases? If the answer is yes, then we should add this market to
the list of release areas.
DonRedman
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