Apple Temporarily Halts New iTunes Match Subscriptions in New International Markets
With Apple launching a broad international roll-out of iTunes Match yesterday to well over a dozen new countries, it appears that the expansion has come with some growing pains for the cloud-based music service. The service had started to prematurely go live for some users the day before, and several hours after the international expansion users around the world reported temporary problems accessing iTunes Store and iCloud services due to usernames and passwords being rejected.
While those technical issues appear to have been resolved, demand appears to still remain high for new iTunes Match subscriptions, and we've been hearing word that Apple has temporarily shut down new subscription signups in some of the new countries. Customers attempting to subscribe to the service are reportedly being met with the following message:
New subscriptions are currently unavailable.
iTunes Match is temporarily not accepting new subscribers. Check back later.
So far we have heard of new subscriptions being halted in Canada and the UK, two of the countries that saw the service debut yesterday. Apple instituted a similar temporary pause in new subscription signups following the U.S. launch last month.
As noted in an extensive chart from setteB.IT, iTunes Match rolled out in a total of sixteen new countries yesterday: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, New Zealand, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. The new countries join the United States and Brazil in offering the service.
Popular Stories
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Top Rated Comments
----------
Explain how its not a screw up?
- 2 days ago they prematurely open Match across the world, charge people and are then forced to refund them because they forgot to update the TOS.
- Yesterday they launch, resulting in the iTunes servers being very slow for most of the day.
- Last night the authentication system completely died and was down for the pest part of the night, intermittently coming back online.
- Then they finally release Match, and have to close it within a day as their tiny server farm (NOT A CLOUD) cant handle the load.
This is the opposite of a screw-up. Apple is taking charge in ensuring that quality of use is not degraded for people who have already purchased the service. Demand is greater than what Apple expected so they'll be opening the gates slowly to allow them to meet demand without crashing the whole thing.
I've spent about £8500 on iTunes over the past 6 years (call me stupid if you want) and then this in return?
this just made my iTunes experience 20x better.
It's ridiculously obvious. Make a tidy profit while some initial press/hype exists, then make it a "killer feature" by the time OS 10.8 comes out.