Well. So it's open now. Ok, let's see. Die Toten Hosen - just one song in a compilation. Emerson Lake & Palmer - no song, didn't even find it in the overview. Same with the Pogues. And Die Ärzte. And Element of Crime. Extrabreit - found under Rock, but no titles. Kraftwerk - the same thing, artist known, but no titles. The Levellers - wow, two albums. But only one with titles - I already have Levelling the Land. The other one - Hello Pig - is without titles. Kate Bush - just one album, Lionheart. Ok, I have everything from her anyway. Then finally: Clannad - apparently all albums, also all with titles. And one that I don't have yet. Wow - my first iTunes purchase. What I noticed when buying: from the overview you can only buy individual titles, not whole albums. For that you have to search for the artist's shop page. But you can't do that with one click from the overview, you have to go through the search. The buying itself is easy - just say you want to buy, confirm that you want to buy, and it starts loading away. And the credit card gets charged. You can nicely see the progress of the download process in the status window and also in the new playlist Purchased Music. Very easy overall. Quite different from the other music stores. What else I noticed: the categorizations are rubbish. Why a sampler with Uns' Udo, Die Toten Hosen and similar stuff is sorted under Pop is as much a mystery to me as the question of why Tom Waits is Rock and how the categorization of Clannad albums sometimes under Folk and sometimes under Pop comes about. Well, at least I didn't have to look for them under Electronic. With Tom Waits, by the way, only the title Rock was listed as a category, but the artist can be found under Alternative. Rather inconsistent.
Also annoying are the sometimes very incomplete compilations of an artist's titles - for example, The Cure does have some albums in there, but on the one hand the release dates are listed as 2001 and on the other hand the albums are sometimes empty and sometimes only have individual songs. Kind of a shame - missed revenue if you ask me.
Also weird was what happened with Tom Waits: Foreign Affairs is listed, but when buying I get a message that it's no longer available. Same with a couple of his other records. But you can play all the songs. Does Apple maybe have some knots in the database? Is there a bug report address?
Nice though is that albums with fewer songs are automatically cheaper than 9.99 euros - good attention to detail in the implementation of the shop!
Buying while a download is still running also works without problems - iTunes remembers all purchased and not yet downloaded songs. It will probably survive a disconnect too, but I didn't want to try that right away.
Otherwise I don't seem to have standard taste, but I think I'll still poke around there for one thing or another. Even if it looks a bit thin at the moment. Damn. Another money pit.