Let’s be honest: how many of us people living in Dubai actually buy overpriced CDs from Virgin Megastore? Frankly, it’s difficult. Dubai itself is a very expensive city but actually buying media is well beyond what anyone can afford. Dhs320 for a newly released CD? You might as well go attend the concert in that money.
Which is, in fact, what most people do. Concerts in Dubai have an INCREDIBLE turn out, but piracy is rampant. And the record labels certainly don’t seem to be hurting very much, nor do the big popstars whose CDs go neglected. I mean, you take one look at the amount of seating and how you can buy a ticket that can go up to Dhs1000 for a seat that’s slightly elevated from the rest and you start smelling something fishy.
But that’s just Dubai. Everything is expensive here.
So you can either shell out a lot of money, download illegally, buy bootlegged CDs from that one person who frequents your apartment building, or go to the appstore where things are pretty inexpensive in comparison!
Unless you live outside of the USA, in which case, you’re confined to the three initial options because, hey, guess what? You can’t buy a $10 album unless your apple account is registered in America!
You know what sucks even more? If the album you’re trying to buy is an indie album.
And as far as I’ve seen, Virgin doesn’t exactly stock indie rock albums.
And if it did?
I sincerely doubt I’d be able to afford it.
So you know what? Instead of being able to support artists I would really, really like to support, I’ve been forced to enjoy their music by “illegally” downloading it because very few people would want to wait three weeks for their CDs to arrive via Amazon and, hey, I’m one of them.
Thanks for that, music industry! Not only are you unaffordable, but you have pretty much stripped the entertainment industry of its raison d’être and, simultaneously, limited what little meaning it has left to a singular country (and Canada/some European countries in some cases).
Kudos to y’all. Doing a great job.
Neiha Lasharie 
I completely agree! I was raging to my sister and brother in law (Who live in the States) the other day about the whole system, they didn’t understand why I ‘illegally’ downloaded when I could just ‘buy it on iTunes’. Sadly, it’s just not possible because UAE’s amazing iTunes store doesn’t sell music, and even with my US App store account I can’t buy anything because I don’t have a credit card that’s registered in the USA -.-
It’s quite annoying, I WANT to support these artists, but it’s just impossible, because not all of us are ready to dish out hundreds of dirhams for CD’s (which people barely use anyways).
EXACTLY! It’s so frustrating