AnalogSenses

By ÁLVARO SERRANO

iTunes Match will not be available outside the U.S. →

June 09, 2011 |

Ars:

Our international readers wanted to know if iTunes Match will be available outside of the US. Unfortunately, for now, iTunes Match is limited to US iTunes Store users. While the service may eventually be available to users in other parts of the world, it will require inking agreements with record labels, music publishers, and other rightsholders for each separate country or region. Apple may be in the process of doing that now, but the company said there is nothing to announce regarding availability of iTunes Match outside the US at this time.

Crap.

This was too good to be true. Particularly in Spain the situation doesn’t look good at all, since the SGAE (General Association of Spanish Authors, manager of copyright licensing fees) has a track record of putting barriers to the arrival of new services like Netflix with its abusive licensing fees (reported to be 2-3 times higher than other European countries like France or Germany).