Believe me, I tried. Frustration was high, but so were spirits. The challenge: to purchase videos from Apple’s US iTunes store, while not being a United States citizen, nor living in the country.
For some obscure reason which they don’t make public, but one can guess emanates from the RIAA, Apple does not allow you to purchase music or other content in their iTunes stores, unless you are from the country that the store belongs to. So, a UK citizen cannot buy music in the US iTunes store, and so on. Fine. Whatever DRM was for…
It is very frustrating to see that in your music store, Bowling for soup only has some 70 songs available, whereas the US music store has 150 songs.
Being based in Barcelona, Spain, I was stuck in the spanish iTunes store. The Office videos (both seasons), were however stuck in the US iTunes store. I would have been quite happy to pay the $2 they asked for each show. I firmly believe in paying fair prices for good, reliable content, and so I set about trying to break down the barriers set against being a satisfied costumer.
Round 1: Direct attempt
My first attempt was to create a US-based account, using a good friend’s address, and my own credit card. This is an address where I have actually lived for some time, so I consider it in my heart as ‘home’ – it’s not just an address of someone I met on the net.
The attempt failed completely, as the iTunes signup process checks the address of the credit card, matching it against the address you say you live at. I was quite amazed that the system also checked the zip code, state and address – it wasn’t going to take any rubbish you threw at it.
Round 2: The back door
iTunes gives you two basic payment methods: credit cards and PayPal. So, I thought about creating a PayPal account with the US address, add my credit card and verify it, then try to get iTunes to accept it. Maybe the process would somehow dilute the geocoding wrath of Apple’s DRM.
The first part seemed to work – I created the PayPal account, and it allowed me to verify my credit card. I will probably deal with PayPal’s verification methods in a sepparate post.
Next step was to create the iTunes account, choosing PayPal as your payment system. The iTunes client then opens your web browser, and points it to PayPal, where you are asked to confirm you want to accept charges coming from the music store.
The iTunes account was finally created, and it allowed me to browse content in the US music store. Searching for The Office videos, I saw both seasons were available, and clicked the purchase button for the pilot episode of season 1. Success! iTunes downloaded the episode, which I added to my iPod’s library, and watched it great satisfaction.
A while later that evening, an email from iTunes arrives – they have a problem charging my purchase of a single $2 video to my PayPal account. So, I log into the PayPal account to see what’s wrong, and I’m greeted with a flurry of disputes to be resolved. The most devastating one is that I have to “confirm my identity” by adding a US-based bank account, something you can only have if you physically open it at a US branch, thus needing to confirm your identity and address, and so on.
After this, I received another couple of emails from both PayPal and iTunes, one saying iTunes had cancelled their invoicing agreement, the other saying they had frozen my account, in all, total defeat.
Round 3: The alternatives
After the disconcerting experience with iTunes, I looked around at alternatives, and was pointed by a friend to allofmp3.com. This is a service very similar to iTunes, but with a twist. First, they are based in Russia, where a loophole exists on the trade of music in electronic rather than physical format. Secondly, they don’t use any form of DRM, and let you encode the tracks you buy in a number of formats and bitrates. And thirdly, the average album will cost you less than $2, as they charge by volume rather than quantity.
They don’t have videos, but checking sites such as TorrentSpy shows you that if iTunes won’t serve them, someone else will…