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.
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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.
Top Rated Comments
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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.