So what's up with the iTunes Music Store in Europe? Because obviously Apple's having a tough time making the whole thing work the way it wants it to; first it took months longer for Apple to reach Europe than anybody had anticipated, and when it finally debuted on the other side of that big blue wet thing to our immediate east, it bore little resemblance to the Utopia of uniform continent-wide pricing and availability that the company had pitched to the press as its goal. Instead, Europe got three balkanized per-country stores, with separate song catalogs and pricing for each; what's worse, each store only allows purchases from residents of its target country, which means that everyone but Brits, Germans, and the French are shut out completely, and Brits are looking to stir up trouble because they have to pay more per track.

When Apple unveiled the three current European iTMS variants, it also announced the expected October launch of a pan-European store that would sell to all European Union countries for a uniform .99€ per song. We've previously speculated that the pan-Euro store is the "real" iTMS, and the current three are stopgap measures to get Apple into the biggest European music markets before Napster et al gets in there first and shuts Apple out. While Steve had originally announced that the pan-Euro store would be in English to start, what we suspect is that the eventual plan is to have localized iTMSes for every European country in the local language and promoting local content, but all being fed from the back-end by this holy grail of a unified European catalog, which would allow consistent pricing and availability from store to store and maybe even the ability (though not the necessity) of shopping at a specific European iTMS even if you're in a different European country. The only thing that should be holding up such a store would be licensing hassles with the European record labels, who are evidently terrified of the idea of (gasp!) selling more music.

Hopefully Apple's close to hammering out a deal, but we're far less confident about that than we could be. Faithful viewer JLo (no, not that JLo... probably) tipped us off to the fact that, according to Reuters, Apple's applications veep Eddie Cue is telling the press that his company is "well on pace to launch more EU stores... next month," which will "likely include more than five new countries" and "cover a good portion of Western Europe." (AppleInsider has previously reported that iTMSes are underway for "the Netherlands, Poland, and Denmark," with Switzerland now being added to the site's list.) Now, maybe it's just us, but this sounds a lot like Apple is scrambling to launch more individual and isolated stores because the pan-Euro thing just isn't coming together quickly enough. Notice that Eddie-Baby makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of an October launch of that all-Europe store that his boss had alluded to last spring.

So it sounds to us like the pan-Euro thing won't touch down for the foreseeable future, and Europeans (and Apple) will have to deal with the hassle of these separate independent and uninteroperable iTMSes for a while, yet. But hey, maybe in ten years or so the European store will be One Big Happy, and then Apple can start persuading the labels to license their music worldwide. Eventually our great grandkids might be able to beam tracks directly to their surgically-implanted skullPods from the planet's grand unified 1.2 billion-song catalog. Of course, by then they'll be complaining that they can't buy music from the iTMS Neptune without having a billing address there.