Not long after we posted that story about the issue with iTunes 12 Days of Gifts promotion, we came across an entry on the Shazamers Blog, listing the countries participating on the International promo. Shazam, the song discovery app, is a global iTunes partner for this year’s promotion. According to that blog entry, the promotion is available in 60 countries around the world, in South America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, but it does not include Indonesia.
In UK, Europe, and Oceania, the promotion is called iTunes 12 Days of Christmas but in Asia and South America, it’s 12 Days of Gifts. While there’s no official list that can be found on Apple’s website, in many countries’ iTunes web page, there’s a banner announcing the 12 day promotion near the bottom of each page. Apple however isn’t extending the promotion to Middle East and Africa, judging by the lack of banner on their respective iTunes pages.
Although Indonesia doesn’t have its own iTunes website – the iTunes section on the Apple website for Indonesia redirects you to the Asian iTunes page – the app was made available on the Indonesian App Store with the Asian variant of the promotion. If Indonesia wasn’t part of the promotion, the Gifts app and the Maroon 5 EP shouldn’t have been available and the Score! football game shouldn’t have gone free today.
Perhaps there was a licensing issue that prevented the Maroon 5 EP to be included as a free gift in the promo in Indonesia and instead was offered as a holiday gift for Rp 19,000 but without official word from iTunes, Apple, or its local partners, it’s a guessing game for everyone else. Additionally, unlike for Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, or the UK, to name a few, the Indonesian page for the Gifts app does not display any local partners, only Shazam.
The support page for the app only mentions push notifications and having to use WiFi to download some content. Furthermore, Indonesia isn’t among the countries with online support available, so it’s difficult to ascertain what is going on. Hopefully by the end of the promotional period on 6 January 2013, there’s a clearer picture of this issue.
