The Highs and Lows of Traveling on iTunes
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 02.13.07 | 6:35 PM ET
If you’re like me, you take your travel thrills where you can get them, even when you’re stuck at home. One way to do that, I’ve found, is to sample foreign music on iTunes, especially music that doesn’t appear in my country’s iTunes store. It’s easy to do: Go to the little “My Store” button at the bottom of the front page and, if you’re in the U.S., change it to Espaņa, Japan, Deutschland or any of the country options. When I do, I get a hint of the feeling I’ve had walking into a Virgin Megastore in Tokyo or a sprawling CD shop in Madrid, suddenly faced with a dazzling array of unfamiliar artists and songs. You can sample 30 seconds worth of just about any song. It’s great, but—and this is a big but—you can’t buy any old song you want to. As Paul Collins reported recently on NPR and Slate.com, many of the songs can’t be purchased with a U.S. credit card.
He writes:
Log out of your home account in the page’s upper-right corner, switch the country setting at the bottom of the page to Japan, and you’re dropped down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of great Japanese bands that you’ve never even heard of. And they’re nowhere to be found on iTunes U.S. You can listen to 30-second song teasers on the Japanese site, but if you try purchasing “Killer Tune”—or any other tune—from iTunes Japan with your U.S. credit card, you’ll get turned away: Your gaijin money’s no good there.
Go to iTMS Japan’s Terms of Sale, and the very first three words, which berate you in all caps, are:
JAPAN SALES ONLY
That’s frustrating. But Collins notes there is one little-known way around the sales ban.
While iTunes Japan pegs foreign undesirables from their credit card numbers, it can’t screen fake Japanese addresses provided by prepaid iTunes Card users. There’s a small but ardent underground economy among Americans in dummy addresses and e-mailed scans of Japanese iTunes Cards, picked up by friends in Tokyo convenience stores or openly sold online.
I haven’t gotten that sophisticated yet. I’ve been content to just take a spin around the other stores every so often and listen to a sampling of what’s out there. But next time I find something I can’t live without, I’ll know what to do—or at least where to begin.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
Timen Swijtink 02.13.07 | 10:35 PM ET
This has been something that has bothered us European users for quite a while now. We can’t get movies, can’t get specials, can’t even get select music content. This all because we don’t have US credit cards. A friend of mine has a US credit card, and he’s buying happily away (in Europe!). Welcome to reality.