I travel full time, and have been living all over the world for the past four years and never had this problem. From Romania to Chile, Venice to England wherever I am, my iTunes works the way I'd expect.
Compared to HULU and Netflix, Apple is one of the best in this regard. I have to get on a VPN to the USA to use my HULU or Netflix accounts, but iTunes just works, globally.
I have a US itunes account, and use it in whatever country I am in with no problem. Apple has never checked my IP address (so I think that's speculation on his part, or a mistake on the part of the support person he talked to.)
It doesn't make sense to have multiple iTunes accounts, and it would be good if Apple would let your merge them.
But it isn't Apple that is making them tied to regions, this is a requirement of the record and movie industries who seem to think that price and release discrimination by region makes sense.
In fact the only time I've had any problems as in Mexico where iTunes Match wasn't working (though Apple has rolled it out there now) but that was likely due to low quality internet, because here in Chile, with no iTunes match, my US iTunes Match is working fine (but a great internet connection.)
I've had no end of problems with them while traveling in SE Asia, including having my account locked several times. If I didn't have a few friends inside Apple put in a word for me I think it's very likely my account would still be locked, with absolutely no explanation as to why.
I've learned the hard way not to go anywhere near the iTunes store without a VPN back to the U.S.
Do you think it might have to do with the specific countries you're in? I've never had an issue with Apple on this but that's from living in Japan and bouncing back and forth between the US/Japan stores. On the other hand, Google usually takes three days or so of warnings before gmail settles down.
> But it isn't Apple that is making them tied to regions, this is a requirement of the record and movie industries who seem to think that price and release discrimination by region makes sense.
It is also a problem for Apps. There are loads of apps available in some countries but not others. It's up to the app developer to make them available globally. I understand not wanting to offer your app in countries where it won't work, but it's super annoying when you visit or move to another country to not be able to access them.
It's a lot of work to set up billing in all the different countries, so they may not have bothered. There are also a lot of legal issue with different privacy laws (Europe being stricter) and censorship requirements (e.g. swastikas in Germany, denigration of Attaturk in Turkey). It's not likely that anyone's actively avoiding global availability, but it may be more worth for a period of time to use their limited resources on making the US version better rather than dealing with those headaches.
When it's fundamentally broken internationally and people start giving it bad reviews when it doesn't work. That's the only case I can think of and even then it's quite weak.
> because here in Chile, with no iTunes match, my US iTunes Match is working fine (but a great internet connection.)
From what I understand, you always had an US account in all the countries you were living. My wife had an US account when we moved to Australia, and it was not possible to access all the content purchased with that account. We confirmed the blocking had to do with the IP address by connecting temporarily through US-based proxies.
It was very difficult to change the US account to be Australia-based. Once this happened we had to re-purchase some apps, but in the end it worked.
My point being that yes: you do find issues when changing the region your Apple account is associated with.
It is not a problem exclusive to Apple. Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, all of them fail in one way or another.
> It doesn't make sense to have multiple iTunes accounts, and it would be good if Apple would let your merge them.
This is impossible. Apple does not let you merge accounts, no matter how high you jump or how much money you're willing to throw at them.
The only way to do that is to manually repurchase everything on the other account. That is assuming that it is still available of course, otherwise your SOL.
Compared to HULU and Netflix, Apple is one of the best in this regard. I have to get on a VPN to the USA to use my HULU or Netflix accounts, but iTunes just works, globally.
I have a US itunes account, and use it in whatever country I am in with no problem. Apple has never checked my IP address (so I think that's speculation on his part, or a mistake on the part of the support person he talked to.)
It doesn't make sense to have multiple iTunes accounts, and it would be good if Apple would let your merge them.
But it isn't Apple that is making them tied to regions, this is a requirement of the record and movie industries who seem to think that price and release discrimination by region makes sense.
In fact the only time I've had any problems as in Mexico where iTunes Match wasn't working (though Apple has rolled it out there now) but that was likely due to low quality internet, because here in Chile, with no iTunes match, my US iTunes Match is working fine (but a great internet connection.)