Border Crossing Blog

Gorbushka--Responses/горбушка--ответы

Ezra remarked about his shock about the pay for music scene in Russia. The penetration of the internet here crosses very much along the growing class lines in this county. An internet connection in Russia is much more expensive than in the United States and most people still use dial up with requires pay-per-minute fees. In addition even DSL connections have Megabyte limitations. As a result downloading music is often more expensive than buy pirated CD's. I don't know what site Ezra uses but this site seems to have good statistics. It would be interesting to know statistics for Moscow. If anybody finds this out, please post.

In response to to Ben's comments, on his site and on mine on my stupidity, his response is no less enlightening. The response 'whatever the market will bear' is a trite one because this statement assumes that markets work properly. If you come to Russia, you will realize, they don't. The fact remains that access to capital in Russia is next to impossible, so that foreign or companies with conncd former KGB) are the only ones that can buy Western software whereas this is impossible for local companies. It is true that the number of alernative applications for the Russian market is growing--though slowly. According to people who know much than me, they are doing this by charging very low licensing fees. Posted by Aaron at May 13, 2004 03:05 PM