Why You Should Use a Turkish Apple ID for iTunes Purchases
Turkish iTunes Store and iTunes Match prices are incredibly cheap after currency conversion. Here is how to take advantage of this overlooked benefit.
You may have heard about Turkish Apple Music being cheaper. After multiple rounds of price increases, it is now almost on par with other regions in terms of pricing. The catalog and features are still more complete though.
What many people do not know about are iTunes Store and iTunes Match. Because these services are relatively niche, Apple has not adjusted their prices. After currency conversion, the prices are essentially near zero.
Albums average around 12 TRY (about $0.30 USD at 1 TRY = 0.023 USD). Occasionally you can find extreme bargains. For example, the Brat deluxe edition for under 6 TRY (~$0.14 USD). There are two identical listings with different prices in the store — probably the label forgot to update one.
Even without bulk discounts, single tracks cost 0.69-1.49 TRY ($0.02-0.03 USD).
Music purchased on iTunes is tied to your account. No subscription needed. Downloads are DRM-free. Unlike streaming subscriptions, you do not have to worry about losing access when a catalog is pulled.
Some albums on iTunes include a digital booklet in PDF format, similar to the booklets that come with physical CDs.
Unfortunately, iTunes LP was discontinued after 2012. You can no longer view album menus, lyrics, or behind-the-scenes content on modern devices.
One more service worth mentioning is iTunes Match, which is included with an Apple Music subscription. Purchased standalone, it costs about 40 TRY per year (~$0.92 USD), roughly the same as one month of Apple Music. The service lets you upload your own music and match it against the iTunes catalog. Unmatched tracks get uploaded to the cloud (similar to NetEase Cloud Music’s cloud drive). But unlike NetEase’s library filled with questionable fake lossless files and pirated uploads, iTunes offers authentic high-quality tracks that can clean up your music library. If lossless is not a priority, matched tracks let you download iTunes Plus (256k AAC) DRM-free files. They are not lossless, but many Chinese platforms serve 320k mp3 upscaled as fake lossless anyway. Downloads from questionable sources vary wildly in quality. With Apple’s server downloads, there is no need to inspect spectrograms.
If anyone is interested in how to set up and use iTunes Match, I can write a separate post about it.