There may be several issues for "this song is not currently available in your region". Apple has not confirmed here anyway, the causes for this. All we can do is guess and assume, or do reliable tests that are well-documented.
Unconfirmed but possible:
- Musicians may change where their music is available at (I suspect and would expect a refund)
- Record company may have a dispute or lawsuit
- It's possible one or both of the above can retract from a region or to a specific country
- Issues can, or may be, compliance, copyright lawsuits with someone else, religious issues, politics, etc
- Metadata issues and song file changes not matching up (delete/resync)
- Stolen music
- Shared music
- pirated music
I believe, pirated/stolen music may not be the problem. I ran my iTunes music through Tableau, and found some songs with over 30 duplicates, some almost 70. However, for example, let's say a song titled "Night Life" showed duplicates. But the dupes are in over 30 different genres, rock, metal, R & B, country, soul, punk, Indie, House, Classical, Class Rock, and multiple songs in the same genre from different rock bands for example. Then there's the Live version, unplugged version, remix versions, higher bitrates, etc etc etc. Which is why I had so many songs of the same name showing duplicate (Using Tableau on my own iTunes was an EYE-OPENER). With that said, how would Apple know if you have stolen music shared from others, ripped from CD or downloaded from a stream or extracted from an YouTube video? It has to be more than just a file name, it would have to be verifiably, an "exact" match. This I would assume is using the hash of the file. I can't imagine Apple worrying or knowing or even their ability to hash all our music and differentiate if we shared our own 1990's CDs at one time and ripped the music. The only music I am aware they do track, is music purchased in the iTunes Store for legal and financial reasons. To track all other music would be much too difficult for space, energy, and time, for no profit. They have no profit or skin in the game for our own personal music we bought from a grocery store or found on street curb, and shared it with others.
Now, considering the hash, it's easy to change the hash of a file, by making just one small change anywhere, the hash will change and be a completely new hash, and an entirely different file even if the music is exactly the same song, sounds the same, and is the same size.
I'm not a hashing or encryption expert, far from it, but suspect they are only interested in the music we purchase from their iTunes store only, and can detect these songs that were purchased for legal and financial reasons. These songs are under control of agreements, country laws, export laws, and may perhaps be revoked/changed by either party, which is iTunes/Apple, the musician/artist, and the recording company. It will likely depend on their agreements. And, it's entirely possible there's an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) in place so they cannot even talk about it if it covers this area.
As Apple has not really fixed this issue in many years, and does not really specify what indicators can trigger this problem, or a good solution to resolve the issue, it appears using a different service is best. I was, however, able to fix my problem so far with no more problems after temporarily fixing my issue with past work-arounds which I thought were permanent fixes.
My last post on what seemed to permanently fix the issue, was being lazy and not wanting to delete all my music and resync thousands of thousands of songs (almost 100k songs).
