What's yours and what's mine?

We have a difficult dilemma. Our daughter has had an iPod (and now an iPhone) for a number of years. When she started using it she was a child, so of course we set her up on our account.

Over the years she has bought a fair amount of music. Now, this is fun for me, because my iTunes has access to all these trendy songs, some of which I rather like. But here's the thing. Now she is an adult she wants to do her own thing. She doesn't want to be on our iTunes account any more. But if she starts a new account, she starts from scratch. She loses her hundreds of tracks. And there is no way to transfer them across.

Take a look online and you will find lots of people asking how to split an iTunes account, sadly in many cases because a couple has split up. It's almost a cliché, a couple deciding who gets which CDs from their collection when they break up and go their separate ways, but on iTunes they are scuppered. It is all or nothing.

Now it is possible that the indivisible iTunes library could mean fewer divorces. But I think on the whole this inability to split a digital library is a bad thing. It is going to be needed more and more as we move to a more cloud-based world. And it is time companies like Apple and Amazon caught up with the reality that they are hosting some of our most treasured assets - and they had better find a way to split these when someone starts off on their own.

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