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?