I bought Utada Hikaru’s new single Beautiful World from the Japanese iTunes store. My preferences are set so that if there’s a Plus version (higher quality for a bit more $$, or in this case ¥¥) I would automatically get that version. Unfortunately, that’s not what I got when I clicked on the the “Buy Album” button. I ended up with the DRM encoded standard version. >_< I e-mailed Apple’s customer support, not sure if everyone on Apple’s JP store speaks Japanese I wrote a short bilingual message. Yes, “why wouldn’t they speak Japanese?” you might ask. Mac OS is in English, so that sets iTunes in English with all the automated messages in English. So it was kinda late at night and I was tired. :P Basically, I said, “I wanted the Plus version of Utada’s album, but got the standard version instead. Help!” That was last night. The response I got this morning was (in Japanese), “We’re sorry, but we can’t do anything. Here is 1 free song credit for your loss.” I’m like, wth… So I spend a good few minutes writing a response that included 2 screen shots, 1 of my downloaded files and 1 of the iTunes store on Utada’s page. I told them that it was their responsibility, otherwise this is fraud. You buy a certain version of something, you pay the proper amount, and instead they give you a suckier version. I even checked during the day if I got a response of some sort, but I didn’t. Now that I’m home and it’s 2 PM in Japan, I received a second response. This one was much better. It was basically another apology and an option on how I want my money back, either via credit card or by store credit. Well, seeing how I don’t have a Japanese credit card, I told them I want it back by store credit. Yeay!
Now I have to go buy the album version because I want a high quality version of Beautiful World. Hikki rules!