USE those international fonts, dang it!

The good news: Apple Computer has struck a deal with independent music distributor The Orchard to sell thousands of Chinese songs and albums on their iTunes Music Store. This doesn't matter much to me, since my knowlege of Chinese music is right up there with my expertise in reading geological strata, but since a large number of my relatives are into Chinese music, this would be a nice way to get them hooked on geekery.

The bad news: The songs are listed in Romanized Chinese (probably Pinyin), which means my non-Pinyin-reading relatives are SOL at actually browsing the store and buying stuff.

What makes this doubly weird is that Apple traditionally has support for international languages up the wazoo; a default installation of MacOS X includes fonts for Chinese, Japanese, Korea, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Thai, and a dozen other non-Roman languages I can't even think of, and their iTunes application doesn't have a problem either. So what's with the lack of international love for the music store?

I can only think of two reasons for this:

1. Apple gets the music tracks from the studios/distributors/artists/whoever with the romanized names, and nobody can be bothered to provide the native names.
2. This is an effort by Apple and/or the studios/distributors/artists/whoever to make things easier for the non-Chinese-reading folks (I refuse to use the term gwailo due to its derogatory roots) to buy stuff.

Either way, it's an annoyance -- after all, how hard would it be to put a preference in their music store on whether to use a song's native language or to Romanize it?

And in the long term, how will this play out when the iTunes Music Store starts selling more songs with non-Roman titles? I'm still pining for the day when I can one-click my way to a collection of Japanese video-game soundtracks...