What can we say? June is being very good to us this year. Another week, another long-awaited Apple product or service finally coming to market; last week the company finally shipped the speed-bumped Power Macs we'd all been waiting for since Christmas or so, and today, at a high-profile media event in London, Steve ended fourteen solid months of anticipation when he finally unleashed the iTunes Music Store upon Europe, as first reported by faithful viewer Small Paul and confirmed by an Apple press release. That's right, folks, the impossible has happened: Euro iTMS is here!

Sort of.

The good news is, what Apple launched today is certainly no mere shadow of the original U.S. store. Feature-wise, it's practically identical; songs are playable on up to five computers, can be burned to CD as often as desired (with a seven-burn-per-playlist limit) and transferred to an infinite number of iPods (provided said iPods aren't busy racing the monkeys to finishing a script for Hamlet). Pricing isn't awful-- 79 pence per song for the Brits and 99 cents for everyone else-- and rather less than had been reported by some rumors that had made the rounds. Just like us Yanks, the Yurps get iMixes, Celebrity Playlists, audio books, gift certificates, allowances ("Monthly Gift" in the UK), music videos and movie trailers, exclusive songs, AOL integration... it's all there, with the apparent exception of the free Single of the Week. Not bad.

And yet, Euro iTMS is still only "sort of" here because it's actually only available to the UK, France, and Germany so far. Rampant anti-Italians-Greeks-'n'-Swedes discrimination up at One Infinite Loop, you charge? Au contraire, bub; if it were personal, there's no way that the UK would be in the first push, because if there's any nationality that has been consistently shafted by Steve over the years, it's the Brits. (Heck, look no further than the 20% higher per-song UK price for proof.) Frankly, we're amazed he had the courage to make a public appearance in London without speaking from within a bullet-proof Popemobile. Brave man. No, the reason why Apple chose to launch in those three countries first is a simple matter of priority: according to Steve (as quoted by Macworld UK), together they represent "over 62 per cent of Europe's music sales," so they're first up to bat.

Fair enough. But what about the remaining 38% of Europe anxious to populate their iPods with legal music while dispensing with all that tedious mucking about with shiny plastic discs? Fret not, Austrians/Finns/Spaniards/Poles/Liechtensteinians/etc.; Apple has a "pan-European" version of the iTMS simmering now that Steve hopes will be soup "by October." While a further four-month wait is no doubt a major disappointment to those of you non-British/French/German Europeans who were hoping to commence your unflagging slide into serious digital music-related debt starting today, cheer up; it could be worse.

For instance, you could be Canadian.

Meanwhile, the more perceptive AtAT viewers out there may have inferred the significance of only a three-country Euro iTMS launch today and the deferment of a pan-European store until at least October: remember when Apple was allegedly negotiating with the record labels for Europe-wide licensing terms? Well, evidently the company hasn't managed to secure them yet, or else today's announcement would surely have been for the all-Europe store-- with localized interfaces for different countries, sure, but with the same back-end catalog and availability. And that's clearly not the case yet.

See, as it turns out, no matter which country you're in, you can fire up iTunes, click "Music Store," scroll to the bottom of the home page, and choose which of the four iTMS flavors you want to view-- and if you go browsing through the catalogs there, you'll eventually find evidence that pan-European music licensing is still just a beautiful dream. For example, while the French store has three Black Eyed Peas albums, the UK store only has one; once Apple finally gets its licensing terms hammered out and launches the all-Europe store, that sort of goofiness shouldn't happen. Even weirder, though, while browsing the European stores, we noticed a ton of artists-- 'Til Tuesday, Culture Club, Kylie Minogue, etc.-- who were listed, but had zero songs available. Maybe it's just a growing pains sort of thing and the content is taking time to flow through and populate the catalog, but we suspect it's more likely that Apple has the content and is awaiting legal approval to unlock it for availability in the stores. In fact, we're starting to suspect that Apple is drastically overrepresenting the current breadth of the European selection.

While Apple makes a big deal out of the iTMS in Europe having a "huge catalogue of over 700,000 songs," we're sitting over here on the other side of the pond playing Little Miss Skeptic. Based on our quick little comparative forays into foreign virtual territory, it's clear that heaping helpings of the U.S. catalog are nowhere to be found. For example, a wildly popular download in all four stores right now is "Bam Thwok," the iTMS-exclusive new song by The Pixies. Thing is, though, at the U.S. store there are no fewer than eleven other Pixies albums available for purchase-- that's 140 songs total. Meanwhile, all of the European stores are conspicuously missing the other 139. Play around for a while and you'll find a lot of that sort of thing. We may be wrong, but we doubt that "local music" in each European store is making up the difference; honestly, walking through in Browse mode makes the place feel like some kind of ghost town.

On top of that, there's this whole "independent label" flap. The U.S. store sells a fair amount of indie content and Steve insists that "the independents want their tracks on iTunes because it's the biggest and best service in the world." Okay, fine. Except that faithful viewer C. J. Corbett tipped us off to a Macworld UK article which reports that the ringing, hollow sound you hear when tapping the side of the Europe stores is due largely in part to Apple having "failed to license repertoire from Europe's independent labels." Reportedly negotiations broke down when Apple demanded terms for European sales that one label described as "commercial suicide." Interestingly, even U.S. and European indie labels that did sign up for the U.S. store are refusing to license content for Euro iTMS; if Beggar's Banquet hadn't agreed to U.S. terms, we wouldn't have been able to buy our copy of Mask by Bauhaus (no, we're not goth, but we've seen one on TV), and yet no Bauhaus recordings appear on Euro iTMS.

"Indies, shmindies," you may be saying, but it's a whole different scene over there in Europe, kids-- reportedly indie music accounts for nearly a quarter of all music sold at retail. Here's hoping that Apple and the labels (major and indie) hammer out their differences and start packin' the place full o' tunage before long. In the meantime, at least French customers get to buy God Bless the U.S.A. (Proud to Be an American) by the American Idol Finalists. What more could they possibly want or need?

Ah, DNS: that seemingly innocuous 'net mechanism by which human-friendly (well, friendlier, anyway) domain names get translated into the raw numbers-'n'-dots IP addresses that make the virtual world go 'round. It's a great thing, isn't it? After all, Apple would probably get a lot less 'net traffic if people had to type in "17.112.152.32" instead of "www.apple.com." Funny how that works.

That said, is it just us, or are DNS failures of various types some of the most frequent site-killing factors on the planet? For example, not long ago faithful viewer mrmgraphics informed us that eWEEK had gone off the air temporarily because it had failed to renew its domain name. Microsoft suffered a similar humiliation a few years back when it forgot to renew "passport.com," thus nuking the entire Hotmail site. Mac OS Rumors is currently spending its second month in DNS purgatory and can only be reached at its raw IP address of 199.105.116.92. And longtime viewers of this little show will recall a longish stretch a few years back (at the height of our grueling trek through D-S-HELL) when we were broadcasting only from a raw IP as well.

Well, a DNS-related calamity finally appears to have befallen Apple, although luckily only for a couple of hours. And it wasn't that standard bonehead move of "we forgot to renew," either, nor was it actually Apple's fault. Faithful viewer David Poves notes that The Register is reporting that "the Internet domain that Akamai uses to host content-- akadns.net-- disappeared" for two hours early this morning. At least, early this morning in the U.S.-- and smack in the middle of the afternoon in Europe. Right about when hordes of download-crazy Europeans were swarming onto Apple's servers for more information about the new iTMS. Or trying to swarm, anyway, since Apple relies heavily on Akamai technology to serve up its web site, which, by that time, was kaput.

Given that Akamai carries "15 per cent of the Net's traffic," Apple was in good company; the Google, Microsoft, MSN, and Yahoo! sites all got hosed, too. For its part, Akamai is denying that there was a general outage and insists that "Akamai name service continued to function" throughout what it claims was a "large scale international attack on the Internet's infrastructure" which attempted to nuke Yahoo!, Google, and other large search engines. Of course, that doesn't explain why we've got an inbox full of messages all sent during that two-hour period asking us why Apple's web site was down. We suppose it could be a coincidence, with all the iTMS traffic hosing Apple's servers exactly when this alleged "attack" was happening, but a number of the messages we received included error messages that seemed awfully specific to DNS, so who knows?

Whatever. The upshot, of course, is that right when Apple needed its site to be at its peak, it was nowhere to be found, and quite possibly just because of a DNS error of some sort. Sounds to us like maybe we've all just gotten a little too reliant on DNS to save us from having to remember those long, icky numbers. Whaddaya say, people-- back to basics? Henceforth AtAT will be known as and accessed exclusively by the address 204.68.168.161. We'll let you know when the t-shirts are updated.