Downloading previous US iTunes purchases now that I live elsewhere

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Downloading previous US iTunes purchases now that I live elsewhere

Hi! I've had an iTunes account for a long time, and being a musician family, we have purchased a lot of music. Then we moved to Italy, and had to change the billing address even on our US credit cards. So I had to create a new iTunes account and use the Italian store. For a while, this wasn't a problem, because we had already downloaded a lot of the music, and also I think the US account would still let me download my purchases as well (don't remember 100%, but I think so).

But this week I bought a new MacBook Pro, and since its hard drive is smaller and I wanted to do some housecleaning, I'm not migrating everything over, but only downloading select data, including some of the music. When I signed back into the American store to download my past purchases, it wouldn't let me. It says there's a billing problem, which of course there is, because my address is Italian. This would make sense if I were purchasing anything, but I'm not!

I suppose I can find some kind of workaround to transfer the music manually from my old computer (my USP ports aren't working either!), but it sure would be nice to just download it straight from iTunes. Do you just get completely locked out of your old purchases on iTunes once you change countries? I had always heard not, but it seems to be the case! :-(

Posted on Jul 3, 2015 7:13 AM

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Answer 1

King_Penguin

Level 10

334,138 points

Jul 3, 2015 8:36 AM in response to LaurainTorino

As well as being tied to the account, all content is also tied to the country that it was downloaded in (the same item might have different rights-holders for different countries) - you won't be able to potentially redownload your US purchases (assuming that they are still in the store) unless you return to the US and have a US billing address on your account. You will need to copy them from your old computer or backup of your downloads/library.

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