How to Purchase iTunes Music in a Different Country

Question

Hi there,
I'm reading that you have to be in a country and you can only download music on that "home" country's site. My problem is that there is music available on iTunes in a different country that I would love to purchase but cannot because I'm not resident there. So... is there a solution to this? Problem is that what I'm looking for is extremely hard to find where I currently live, in fact it's impossible. Is the purchase dependent upon your credit card billing address? Just wondering if there's any kind of solution to the dilemma or whether this is all legal stuff causing the issue. I mean, I can go on-line and purchase an item in, say, Europe, charge it to my North American credit card with the appropriate currency conversion applied. So, why can this not be done in iTunes?
If there's a solution please let me know. Thanks!
L.

Answer 1

Sorry, but at this time there is no solution. It's due to restrictions placed on Apple by the record companies and other rights holders.
Is the purchase dependent upon your credit card billing address?
The billing address is primarily to verify your residence in your country.
? Just wondering if there's any kind of solution to the dilemma or whether this is all legal stuff causing the issue.
It is indeed "legal stuff" and there is, I'm sorry to say, no solution. From This Business of Music (10th Edition) (by M. William Krasilovsky and Sydney Shemel) (and thanks to the Mimico Kid for the reference) :
The difficulty of establishing workable business models for digital files (...) extends to where they are sold and where they are played. This is the issue of territoriality, and it is an illustration of how the Internet makes it necessary to reexamine basic assumptions that have been taken for granted (...).
(....) In the music business the primary problem is that copyrights are national and therefore specific rights are tied to national laws and the interpretations of national courts.
(.... T)hough we can one day hope to see the development of common standards with respect to copyright, the fact that the music business is building upon a history of nation-specific contractual relationships means that the goal of universal international standards is not, for the forseeable future, a practical one.
(...) Adding to the difficulty (...) the copyrights themselves may have been assigned to different companies in different territories. The best hope for a cleaner start and a simpler future is worldwide recognition that digital uses are in fact - and should be in law - totally new.
The content owners don't like cross-border sales of CDs either, but there's nothing they can do to stop such sales. They can, though, and do stop cross-border download sales, since if the download stores refuse, the rights holders won't license the tracks to that store.
So unless and until the record companies, et. al, all get together and agree to allow download stores to sell cross-border, there's absolutely nothing Apple or any other download store can do. They have to license for each country individually, and the holders of the rights for a given country may not with to grant such a license, and in some cases there is no one who holds the distribution rights for a given item in your country.