Honestly, we don't mean to bag on the British, but if Apple really did have some sort of grudge against them a few years back, we're starting to understand why. Consider just how many of Apple's recent and ongoing woes have originated in the UK; the biggest is probably the Beatles lawsuit, which unspecified legal sources claim might result in Apple having to cough up the biggest non-class action settlement ever. Not long after that suit was filed, Brits banned an Apple commercial because the G5 may not actually have been "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer." And most recently there's that UK consumer watchdog group trying to get Apple busted for preventing Brits from buying songs from the French or German iTunes Music Stores in order to save a few pence.

Well, toss another annoyance on the pile, folks, because while we forgot to mention that whole thing with British indie record labels refusing to sign with the iTunes Music Store for ages and ages (they apparently demanded the right to raise prices and break the iTMS's uniform price structure at a later date), we are going to mention how said UK indie labels are now whining that their music isn't available online now that they've finally reached an agreement. According to The Guardian, those very same labels who dragged their feet on signing up until well after the iTMS had formally launched in Europe are now expressing "frustration" that their catalogs still aren't up at the iTMS UK even though they "signed a license weeks ago."

Weeks ago! Yes, while Apple had no doubt been courting these same labels for months on end and was eventually forced to launch its store without them, they're "perplexed" and "bewildered" by the fact that Apple has the gall to take "weeks" to get the music online. Did we mention that there are hundreds of these labels who had all refused to sign, acting together under the auspices of the Association of Independent Music? And that means they had all probably signed at once. Gee, hundreds of record labels all finally decided to climb on board the iTMS at once a few weeks ago, and they can't figure out why their music isn't online yet? Well, here's one possibility: the iTMS Fairy is on vacation and she took her magic wand and pixie dust with her.

We're just speculating, here, of course, but it seems to us that there's a frightening amount of stuff to do before a label's catalog can be made available for sale at the iTMS. First, there's all the legal stuff that probably has to be approved and filed even after the contract itself is signed. Then there's the actual encoding of the music; here in the U.S. we thought that the indies themselves were responsible for that, but maybe in the UK, where indie labels frankly don't sound much different from the Big Five in terms of demanding higher prices and whatnot, maybe the agreement's different. So there's the encoding of the music, the setting of the ID3 tags, the addition of album art, etc. Now, take the legal issues, add them to the technical ones, and multiply by the hundreds of UK indie labels and suddenly it might not seem so "bewildering" that, "weeks" later, things still aren't ready for downloading.

We repeat, this is all just guesswork, and might be completely off-base. After all, at least some of the encoding's done, since a lot of those indies have their music on the U.S. iTMS, and some of them are complaining that they haven't even gotten a contract to sign, yet, so maybe the reason that nothing's moved forward is because Apple really is just slacking off. We don't know. What we do know is that we'd be completely stunned if Apple had somehow gotten the music of hundreds of indie labels online and ready to sell within just weeks of the contracts being signed. And we also know that instead of considering these factors, the indies decided it'd simply be best to whine to the press about the delay. Sheesh, if this sort of thing keeps up, if there wasn't an anti-UK vendetta before, there will be soon...