- 2 November 2007
- 889
It took quite some time but some chinese hackers have cr***ed the iTunes algorihm. While there are some legitimate digital music download sites in China - including 9Sky, Top100 and the recently launched Wawawa - digital music is proving to be a tough sell in the P.R.C, partly because of the market dominance of Baidu’s free mp3 search. There are, however, people making decent profit in this as yet unmeasurable market: the hackers of Apple’s iTunes store gift vouchers and their local agents.
In China’s biggest C2C online shopping site Taobao, $200USD iTunes gift cards are for sale at 17.9 RMB, roughly $2.6 USD.
There are thousands of cards for sale at the same time. Choose one seller whose Taobao IM is online, talk to him a little bit, purchase his product and pay money to Taobao’s online payment system, Alipay, which supports most banks in China.
All the seller actually sells is the gift voucher code which they send you directly through Taobao’s IM software. You can then redeem the card in your iTunes account
Once successfully redeemed you then click ‛confirm’ and Alipay transfers your 18 RMB to the seller and you are free to start downloading:
The owner of the Taobao shop told us frankly that the gift card codes are created using key-generators. He also said that he paid money to use the hackers’ service.
Half a year ago, when they started the business, the price was around 320 RMB for 200 USD card, then more people went into this business and the price went all the way down to 18 RMB per card, “but we make more money as the amount of customers is growing rapidly.”
“The hackers are based in China, but I don’t know if they do the same thing in eBay”, the Taobao shopkeeper said.”Most of our customers use iTunes store for music, then Apple applications (bear in mind that the iPhone is only available in the grey market in mainland China) and films. iPod games are least popular.”
So, this gives Apple a depressing price point for its iTunes services in an otherwise unfathomable online music market: $2.60 (18RMB) for $200USD worth of products.
In China’s biggest C2C online shopping site Taobao, $200USD iTunes gift cards are for sale at 17.9 RMB, roughly $2.6 USD.
There are thousands of cards for sale at the same time. Choose one seller whose Taobao IM is online, talk to him a little bit, purchase his product and pay money to Taobao’s online payment system, Alipay, which supports most banks in China.
All the seller actually sells is the gift voucher code which they send you directly through Taobao’s IM software. You can then redeem the card in your iTunes account
Once successfully redeemed you then click ‛confirm’ and Alipay transfers your 18 RMB to the seller and you are free to start downloading:
The owner of the Taobao shop told us frankly that the gift card codes are created using key-generators. He also said that he paid money to use the hackers’ service.
Half a year ago, when they started the business, the price was around 320 RMB for 200 USD card, then more people went into this business and the price went all the way down to 18 RMB per card, “but we make more money as the amount of customers is growing rapidly.”
“The hackers are based in China, but I don’t know if they do the same thing in eBay”, the Taobao shopkeeper said.”Most of our customers use iTunes store for music, then Apple applications (bear in mind that the iPhone is only available in the grey market in mainland China) and films. iPod games are least popular.”
So, this gives Apple a depressing price point for its iTunes services in an otherwise unfathomable online music market: $2.60 (18RMB) for $200USD worth of products.
