Most of the songs so far have been pretty unimpressive, though last week’s offering in the Canadian store was a decent track by The New Pornographers. I was originally on the mailing list for the US store, and had wanted a track that they were advertising as the free track of the week; sadly, they don’t allow just anyone to download the free tracks.

I think the reasoning used is that there are cross-border licensing issues, and the one benefit is that you tend to see national bands appear; American artists in the US store, Canadians in the Canadian store, etc. I thought that it couldn’t be that difficult to game the system, so I went about setting up an account in each store that was known to hand out free tracks; Canadian, US, and UK.

It turned out to be pretty easy when I did it; I used a credit card to sign up in the Canadian store, as I might want to buy a track now and again. That was the one that was pretty straight-forward and easy; the other two were surely be more difficult…

It turns out that when I signed up, there was a payment option in both the US and the UK stores that simply didn’t exist in the Canadian store; NONE. I was able to enter the address of an accounting firm in London as the street address to verify that I was English; or that I could use a search engine to find a valid postal code. With the payment option of NONE, it’s not a “Send me a bill” option; it’s just an account that doesn’t buy music, but still allows you to download the free tracks. I looked at the UK signup recently, and it appears that this option may have been removed recently when they added a couple new payment options to the UK store, but I’ve apparently been grandfathered in, as I was able to download today’s track.

Surprisingly, I ran into the same option when I went to signup for the US store. For a country that’s as tied to Credit Card as ID as the United States is, I’m surprised that they didn’t require one to authenticate the account. In this case, an address in Blaine, WA sufficed to fill the form, and when my zip code wasn’t correct, I was offered a choice of valid WA zips to choose from; very handy.

I was concerned that having these three accounts would screw things up, and that I wouldn’t be able to use the Canadian store to buy things, or that Something Bad Would Happen. When I’m logged in as the Canadian, I use the “Choose Store” button and change to the UK store, click on the free track to download it, and I’m asked to login. If I login as my UK ID, the track downloads, and then I can go to the next store and then the next.

Sadly, the Japanese store had no payment option that I could use to complete signup; Japan must be getting more used to the whole idea of credit cards. It doesn’t appear that they’ve started giving away free tracks, yet, so maybe in a month or two I’ll try again.