Apple has announced that its iTunes Store is now officially open for business in SA. The store offers a selection of over 26 million songs for purchase and download and its availability has been long-awaited in SA.
The iTunes Store is also being expanded to Russia, Turkey, India and 52 other countries. Apple says the store features local artists, including Zahara in SA. Music from the store comes in Apple's DRM-free format with 256kbps AAC encoding for audio that Apple says is "indistinguishable from the original recordings".
The iTunes Store also offers a selection of movies and series for rent or purchase, but this functionality is still not available in SA as yet. The 'Games' category is also still not available locally.
Apple communications manager for local Apple distributor Core Group, Taryn Hyam, says: "Apple leads the digital music revolution with iPods and the iTunes Music Store and we are thrilled that South Africans are able to purchase music locally. We already have access to the App Store with hundreds of thousands of Apps and this gives South Africans the opportunity to get even more out of their Apple products."
The iTunes in the Cloud service also allows for users to download all purchased music to their iOS devices at no additional cost. Music not downloaded from the store can also be synced across devices with iTunes Match via iCloud.
The iTunes Store is included in iTunes 11, which was released by Apple last week. The new version of iTunes marks the most significant redesign of the service to date, and includes a more simplified and integrated user interface. It is available for Mac and PC and can be downloaded from the Apple site.
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