Transferring media between iTunes Store accounts

Jesse Hollington
By Jesse Hollington - Senior Editor
Transferring media between iTunes Store accounts

Q: When I was a kid I used my dad’s iTunes account, and I’ve purchased many movies and TV shows there. Now I’ve created my own iTunes account and I can transfer my movies and songs over to my new library, but I can’t play them on my account because they’re bound to his. I got all of my songs onto my account by burning them to CD’s and than just importing them onto my computer and when I did this they’re no longer bound to his account.

However, TV shows and movies are more tricky. Is there any way to transfer the TV shows and movies to my account?

Transferring media between iTunes Store accounts

– Nick

A: Unfortunately, there is no way to actually transfer “ownership” of these files to your iTunes Store account. However, you can play them in your own iTunes library on your own computer simply by authorizing your computer for you dad’s iTunes Store account.

Each iTunes Store account can be authorized on up to five different computers and you can therefore share purchased music and video content between any of those authorized computers.

To authorize your computer for another iTunes Store account, simply choose Store, Authorize Computer from the iTunes menu and enter in the iTunes Store account name and password when prompted.

Transferring media between iTunes Store accounts

Note that this user name and password only needs to be entered once to authorize the computer for that purchased content, after which you will be ready to play that content on that computer as well as transfer and play it on any iPods that you are synchronizing with that computer.

By Jesse Hollington Senior Editor
Jesse Hollington was a Senior Editor at iLounge. He's written about Apple technology for nearly a decade and had been covering the industry since the early days of iLounge. In his role at iLounge, he provided daily news coverage, wrote and edited features and reviews, and was responsible for the overall quality of the site's content.