One of the new features of iTMS is the ability to gift a friend gift certificates allowing the purchase of songs through iTMS. Sounds jolly and nice for us who don’t stay in the US of A.
At the moment, the store only allows purchases with US-based credit cards. So with gift certs, maybe its possible that we can redeem it, and start getting the tunes.
So I got Michael in the US to send me a US$10 gift certificate after sending him the money via PayPal. After receiving it in my mail box, there’s this big REDEEM NOW button which one can click. It automatically switch to iTunes Music Store to the redeeming page. And its there where I got stuck.
Although I have a .Mac address, which meant I automatically have an account in iTMS. But I still need to activate the account, which also meant that I’ve to key-in information like address, telephone number. The only optional thing, ironically, was the credit card info. So I’m back to square one.
One possible reason why iTMS has not spread to the rest of the world could be because of this patent that Microsoft is being sued over in Europe.
In the iTMS Support page it is stated that:
bq. …can be used to purchase music and audio books from the iTunes Music Store
So why does the purchase of tunes by gift certificates require a US-based address? When you get any kind of gift certificates, do they care where you got it or where you are from? And as of now, the gift certificates can only be used in iTMS, shouldn’t Apple assume that the purchases are made in the USA? Or am i missing anything?
I suppose I can just get a friend’s address for me to fill in so that I can make use of the gift certificate. Anyway, I’ve yet to do that and I’m still trying to find out more and hopefully have a better way to make use of it.
update – on hindsight, realised the one big stumbling block for any transaction to take place in itms, is that the copyrights issues with music distributors in that individual’s country need to be resolved before music can be downloaded, free or purchased.
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