Mexico now has its own iTunes Music Store with singles selling for 15 pesos a piece. Figured that was time for another update of the iTunes Currency Index. Notice that Mexicans are paying 38% more than those North for iTunes songs. An odd sort of price discrimination to say the least. Currency Exchange Rate Local … Continue reading “Hola, Mexico to the iTunes Index”
CommSec today launched an iPod Index which compares the price of iPod nanos around the world to determine whether exchange rates are over or under-valued. It is, of course, based on the Big Mac Index but it is a poor substitute for the iTunes Index (both music and games) developed on this blog.
Apple has opened its iTunes store in New Zealand today. Songs are NZ$1.79 and regular readers will know what that means: I can add them to the iTunes Index for exchange rates. You can get some background on that here and here. But here is the new table:
This week’s Business Review Weekly contains a write-up of the iTunes Index familiar to readers of this blog (click here and here for the Aplia write-up); text over the fold. The BRW puts the exchange rates relative to the US dollar. One issue with that is that they all seem over-valued mainly due to the … Continue reading “iTunes Index in BRW”
One of my first blogging ideas (way back when) was the idea of using iTunes song prices rather than Big Mac prices to compare current exchange rates to purchasing power parity. I have posted today a new blog on Aplia which updates that Index (new numbers and more countries). For Australia, the predictions for current … Continue reading “Updated iTunes Index”
A few weeks ago, The Economist published its annual Big Mac Index. This has been a long-standing exercise by that newspaper to examine how close current exchange rates were to purchasing power parity (or PPP). The idea is to take a standardised commodity that is otherwise locally produced and compare prices across countries. According to … Continue reading “An iTunes Index for Exchange Rates”
As regular readers of this blog are aware, I have been tracking an iTunes (Song) Index (click here for past entries). The general story there is that (apart from Canada), the iTunes Index suggests that currencies are over-valued relative to the US dollar. This is in contrast to the Economist’s Big Mac Index which has … Continue reading “The iTunes Games Index”
OK so the Commonwealth Bank just sat back and compared new iPod nano prices and found differences. But they didn’t go to each country like I did! Also, as I have written before, the iTunes Index is more appropriate, economically.
Stuart Maxwell notes that iTunes DRM-free pricing has begun to appear around the world (click here). We know its baseline pricing differs from country-to-country. Its DRM-free pricing will differ too but, in theory, the ratio of DRM and DRM-free song prices should be the same. Well, apparently not. In the US and Europe there is … Continue reading “iTunes DRM-free pricing”
A regular theme on this blog has been differences in Apple’s iTunes Music Store pricing for songs, games and videos. I even launched an iTunes Index based on such differentials. Today the EU has taken action against such differences arising inside the EU.
Core Economics 