I've encountered the same issue: moved to a new laptop and my GarageBand artist lessons I purchased back in 2009 & 2010 are not available, with no obvious way to get them back.
After trying many of the suggestions from around the web to no avail, I decided to call Apple support for help. These folks are always very earnest and they went out of their way to help me. Here are some of the things they had me try:
- Go to store.apple.com and search order history. As others have reported, that only goes back 18 months.
- Asked me to search ~/Library/Application Support/Garageband/ (that folder didn't exist on my new laptop).
- Asked if I still had access to the data from the old laptop (I did not)
- Had me go through my order history in the iTunes Mac App. Although that goes back way further than 18 months, for some reason my artist lessons weren't listed there
- Asked me to find the original email receipts. I did find them, but they still couldn't access my original order from those order numbers.
In this process I got passed from the original advisor to a senior advisor then to an "itunes specialist". They said that since my purchases predated the App store, that they should be in my iTunes order history, but obviously they were not. Finally they told me they needed engineering to research this further. The advisor gave me a case number and a phone number to get direct access back to him, and told me they'd have an answer in 2 business days.
An hour later he called me back and said they'd credit my iTunes account for the cost of the missing lessons and to just go ahead and re-purchase them.
Bottom line, I'm a satisfied customer. If you haven't tried calling Apple Support, I'd say give it a try. It's a breath of fresh air as opposed to most large company's support call centers!
