I'm living on the wrong side of the world

This week, I'm looking forward to M. Ward's Post-War, which was originally supposed to be out last week. I enjoyed his previous Transistor Radio and am rather looking forward to the new one. The thing is, living in Singapore doesnt exactly make listening to new releases very easy. For one, it takes forever for the stores to stock up new stuff, sometimes as long as 2 months (I kid you not). And if they do stock up (like HMV), they often charge outrageous prices.

Preordering from the labels/artists doesnt work as well, since the warehouse will only ship them a couple of days before the release date, and cds usually take about a week or so, sometimes 3 (I kid you not) to reach Singapore. And not to mention that shipping is bloody expensive.

What I usually do is to settle for mp3 subscription services like emusic. For a relatively good price per month, I get a pretty good selection of stuff I need to get and what I want to check out. But recently, due to some copyright shit (geographically-based distribution deals), emusic limits the releases of some cds to only the US. It would be futile to blame emusic for this as they are bound by the contracts they sign etc, but come on, does noone realise the stupidity, the inanity of this arrangement? This is the Internet, fer fucks sakes.

Sometimes it's really hard not to fire up the bittorrents, that's all I'm saying.