My attempts to buy online music continue to be frustrating.

If you have been flying ANA in recent years, you will have heard (and most likely enjoyed) the music they play during boarding and landing, a song by Japanese violinist Taro Hakase. The track is available in the German iTunes Store, both as part of the album as well as individually. One download (11 MB, 99 cents) later, I was shocked to find out that the recording abruptly stops three minutes into the five minute piece.

This could have been an incomplete download (these things happen quite often behind the Great Firewall), but it did not look that way (iTunes reported no errors, and the progress bar was showing the 11 MB I got from the very beginning). When I nevertheless tried to download it again I had to find out that while the ability to re-download music you have purchased, a feature that has been long-overdue and only recently added as part of iTunes in the Cloud, is in fact, unlike many of these services, available internationally (i.e. outside of the United States), it is still not being offered for Germany. Thank you, GEMA. I complained to Apple about the broken song, they apologized, gave me a refund and said that they will get in contact with the record company (which can take several weeks).

Next stop, Amazon. They have the song on their German website (cheaper, too, just 84 cents), and I could click to put it in my shopping cart, only to find out on a later page that "due to geographic restrictions for the requested product" they would not be able to complete my order.