Songs Please

July 6, 2008 8:03 PM

How do you download Singstar songs from non-U.S. singstores? (PS3 question)?

For some reason, I'm guessing due to licensing issues, those of us in the U.S. can't purchase and download songs from Queen, Morrissey, and other great artists from PS3's online store. They're only available to PS3 users in Europe.

Apparently there's a workaround that's worked only for a handful of people in the U.S., where you open a fake PS3 account in Belgium and use American Express.

I tried this method and failed. Have any U.S. residents here purchased Singstar songs from Europe successfully? Would love to know how.

posted by The ____ of Justice to sports, hobbies, & recreation (2 comments total)

The likely reason why your purchase failed is because though you were buying from the European Playstation store, your copy of Singstar was purchased in the States. In order to use European downloadable content, you'll have to purchase the European version of Singstar. The PS3 has no region lockouts for games, so at least you won't have to modify or hack your console.

Make sure, though, that the Belgium scheme will actually work; I don't know for sure but based on the presence of native-language songs for individual European countries, it's possible that Queen and Morrissey, amongst others, are in the UK Singstar store only. Figuring out what's in each region's Singstar store seems to be as easy as divining the principles of calculus from thin air, so I can't offer you any insights. If you can get a single-use credit card to open a UK-based PSN account, though, that could save you some grief (unless the other people with the Belgian accounts report success downloading the specific artists/songs you want, in which case never mind).
posted by chrominance at 10:33 PM on July 6, 2008

The likely reason why your purchase failed is because though you were buying from the European Playstation store, your copy of Singstar was purchased in the States. In order to use European downloadable content, you'll have to purchase the European version of Singstar. The PS3 has no region lockouts for games, so at least you won't have to modify or hack your console.

Not exactly.

The place where you're running into the region lock is in the online store, not in the version of the game you have. (I had the UK version of Singstar and was very happy when the US store came up because then I could finally buy something.) All of the PSN stores require two things:

1) To access the store, you have to have a PSN account for the region in question - easily done in this case because you accounts are free and it takes all of five minutes to register a new one. You need to be logged into that account when you launch Singstar to see the store for another region.
2) For purchasing, you need a complete set of working billing information for that region - a working card and a valid address on which to use it. This is the hard part, as most credit card companies aren't going to let you just make up an address and run your card through it.

The AmEx "hack" that's been documented a few places is basically due to Amex being a little lax about the address checking, but it wouldn't surprise me if Sony caught onto this and locked it down.

You may have also heard about a service called Entropay that allows you to have virtual credit cards, but if you are a US citizen you cannot use it due to the internet gambling legislation. I've gone back and forth with their helpdesk and got nowhere. If you're in Europe trying to buy off the US PSN stores, though, their service is apparently great.

chrominance has the right idea - a single-use credit card is probably your best bet. And maybe, if we're lucky, SCEE will start releasing PSN point cards so importing them would be a little easier.
posted by Remy at 4:55 AM on July 8, 2008