Buying from both the american & french iTunes store

Posted August 24, 2006 * Comments(2)

I moved to the USA from Paris in January of 2000. I was lucky then to settle in Boston, a very welcoming town for foreigners and especially Europeans. There, I met a few french people and had a solid group of friends to turn to when I wanted to speak or hear french. The .com bubble burst and pretty much all of them were sent back home even though they were in the middle of getting a green card (I had one by then and got to stay).

While they are many opportunities to immerse myself in french culture in Boston (french library, french movie festival, …), I simply found myself listening to a lot of french music. I go back to France to visit with my parents roughly every six months so I usually load up on new french CDs.

Since I got my iPod, I bought quite a few songs on the iTunes USA store. Since then, also, the french iTunes store opened with galore of french rock, reggae and rap (Hah !).

But it seems I can’t use both. If I try to buy something with my US based .mac account on the French iTunes stores, it sends me back to the US store (where that music is not available). Now of course, I could create a french based account with a french credit card (I still have one) but from what I understand I couldn’t have both sets of songs in my iPod, I’d have to choose one or the other. How is that ‘Play Fair’ ?

Dear Lazyweb, help ?

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2 Comments so far

  1. JT on September 9th, 2008

    I am in the same predicament. The U.S. iTunes store has a horrific selection of French music. If you want to spend the time you could download the music from the french iTunes and then burn them onto a CD and then rip the CD into an Mp3. The new Mp3′s wouldn’t be copyright protected and you could transfer them onto your iPod. However, depending on the speed of your computer this could take 15 minutes instead of 15 seconds. Unfortunately, I don’t have a credit card from France and cannot currently utilize their iTunes store.

  2. CW on January 8th, 2010

    I tOtally agree this is now fair at all.
    It is really ashamed that we can’t have both on an ipod.
    There is not the same stuff to buy on the different itunes.

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