Apple's iTunes European debut held up by red tape

While the European music industry keeps suing their customers, Apple is still not able to offer their iTunes Music Store in Europe. Now an article from Reuters sheds some lights on the reasons for this:

Eddy Cue, vice president of applications and Internet services for Apple, said one hurdle Apple has run into is the age-old practice of staggered release cycles, meaning some songs would not be available to all European consumers at the same time.

Marketing and distribution timetables often prevent music labels from a pan-European launch of an artist, meaning German consumers may have to wait weeks to buy what their friends in the UK are already listening to.

"One of the things we are working with the European labels on is to get them to understand how the business works in the online space, and having them change some of their business practices," Cue said.(...)"

Well, looks like the big music labels still haven't come to terms with the fact that Kazaa et al. will never know things like "staggered release cycles".

But there seems to be another problem. Many in the music industry just don't believe that online music distribution is here to stay:

"Until somebody gets to 50 million, 100 million, 150 million downloads per month, which by the way is not impossible, we are all going to lose money," said John Rose, executive vice president of EMI Music Group in U.S.

Doesn't sound too optimistic, does it !?