Nearly eight months after 90-second song previews started rolling out on the US iTunes Store, Apple have today started transitioning a number of international iTunes stores over to the 90-second previews, a vast improvement on the 30-second previews. Currently we’ve noticed that the iTunes stores in Australia, UK, Canada, New Zealand and France and a handful of other European stores.
However, despite the beginning of this international rollout there are still a lot of songs that haven’t transitioned to 90-second previews – looking at the top 10 songs on iTunes in Australia found just half now have the longer preview period. For comparison all top 10 songs in the US have the 90-second preview, although keep in mind that not all the 10 songs were the same in the two stores.
That difference could just be because Apple has only just started to transition to 90-second previews in the international stores or because licensing deals are (as is very typical) delaying the transition to longer previews. Nonetheless international iTunes users will no doubt welcome this change that has been awaited for quite some time.
