Jotting down some notes and thoughts for my readers on Facebook yesterday, I mentioned the term geo-blocking. I think everyone’s painfully familiar with this inconvenient feature of the internet: you go to a site, including YouTube, to look at some specific content, and the site tells you, sorry, this content, video, etc. is not available in your area.
In my view, geo-blocking has become an anachronism. It has no place in 2021. Why, for example, should a Canadian be prevented from watching a British or French TV show? Why can’t a German, who is desperate to improve his or her English, access a show that airs on an American streaming service? The internet was supposed to make the world smaller, moving people of different cultures and backgrounds closer together. Instead, through geo-blocking, we have erected even more borders than there are in the real world. Even worse, for those who wish to make money from content they create: fed up with being blocked, people find alternative ways to obtain the content they want—translation: they manage to get their hands (or eyeballs) on the coveted content without paying for it.
Most of you may not be aware of this, because most people today have no sense or understanding of real music, as opposed to the noise that passes for music these days (real music died in the 1990s), and consume any music (that is, noise) that Spotify or Apple Music recommends to them. But music, too, is subject to geo-blocking. Mind you, the noise most people listen to today isn’t affected by this, but if you are an educated, refined, sophisticated, discerning and cosmopolitan consumer and connoisseur of real music, like me, you will know what I’m talking about, and it can drive you up the wall.
Canada and the United States, two countries so close to each other, in spirit, culture and language, might just as well be on two different planets where music is concerned. A well-known song by an equally well-known singer like Dean Martin, for example, may not be available to you if you happen to live in Canada. Meanwhile, Americans across the border from you can stream or purchase the song without any problem whatsoever, but when you click the link, you’re shown the familiar geo-blocking notice. (Sometimes, such a song may be available in America and even in Britain or Germany, but you, as a Canadian, can’t get it.) Why is that, you wonder?
It’s not a conspiracy against Canadians, or whatever nationality might be affected from time to time. It’s simply a case of someone who happens to own the rights to a song like that and, for some inexplicable reason, decides to select only a handful of countries in which to release the song. It’s a process any YouTube user will have experienced themselves: when you upload content to YouTube, you’ll be asked to set a series of parameters for your content, which also includes the geographic range. For example, you can choose to make your video visible to the entire world, certain regions, or only very specific countries. The same happens whenever someone releases a TV show, movie, book, song or album. Before your content goes live, you check a few boxes here and there, and you’re off.
Let me illustrate how annoying those geo-blocking problems are by describing examples I myself have encountered. But rest assured that it’s the same for everyone else, no matter where they live or which country they try to gain access to.
French is an official language of Canada, and it is the only official language of Québec. Yet, very often when I look for a specific song or version, by a well-known artist, in France, the system, such as iTunes or others, tells me: The content you are looking for is not available in your area. That song I’m looking for is available in iTunes France, yes, sometimes even in iTunes USA, but not in iTunes Canada! A song recorded in French can be purchased in the United States or even Japan, but not in Québec, where French is actually the one and only official language! I put it down to oversight and ignorance, rather than malice: the record label, rights holder or artist simply doesn’t know that there is a market for that particular song in French-speaking Québec.
As I said, this is extremely annoying, especially when you consider that the song in question, when it was first released on a vinyl record in, say, 1965, was widely available in record stores in Québec, but today in 2021, because it is now delivered as a combination of ones and zeroes, you are not allowed to stream or purchase it.
Unfortunately, this story repeats itself all over the world. I also know of German songs and albums that are not available in Austria or Switzerland, and vice versa. At the same time, though, the music industry keeps complaining about the meagre earnings and profits that streaming and online purchases generate for them. Almost every week, I see an article where artists say how little money they’re actually making from the online marketplaces for music. And they’re right: most of that money (which really isn’t all that much) goes to record labels and rights holders, with what’s left over going to the actual artist you hear in the recording (and who may also have written the song in the first place).
Speaking of rights holders. There’s a new trend in town. Rights holders now are increasingly investment funds, companies who have purchased the rights to master recordings. As a result, songs from those catalogues are being released, or withheld, for the purposes of shaping the prices of shares or units in such investment funds. You want to boost your future profits on the “Dean Martin unit”? No problem, let’s just pull all Dean Martin recordings off the market for a few years, or at least in selected markets, thus creating artificially pent-up demand, and then we’ll re-release them all, or in trickles, and we’ll make a killing.
I find all this extremely annoying and unnecessary. Everyone should be free to access, and purchase, any TV show, movie, book or song of their choice, regardless of the country of origin or language. These types of artificial borders and boundaries have no place in the globalized and interconnected world of the twenty-first century. Not only is geo-blocking annoying as heck, it also goes against the most basic principle of business: in order to maximize your profits, you must also maximize the number of people you can sell to. Geo-blocking does the exact opposite; it minimizes your profits, because it minimizes the reach of your product. And that’s just… stupid!