While American music fans have bought and downloaded 30 million songs and
counting from Apple's iTunes
music store, many Canadians are still waiting for their first chance to
buy some tunes from Apple.
Many more Canadians, however, said to hell
with waiting for Apple to figure out the licensing deals in Canada, and have
pointed their browsers at Puretracks, Canada's first digital
music download service.
Like Apple's iTunes store, music is a 99 cents
(Canadian) a song. Unlike Apple's store, Puretracks is not for Mac users. It
works on Windows only.
The big news from Puretracks today, though, is that it has now had a million
downloads since its launch in October.
“Puretracks is all about delivering the best in online digital music, and
this milestone demonstrates that hundreds of thousands of Canadian music
fans and our business partners agree,” said Alistair Mitchell, co-CEO and
co-founder of Puretracks, said in a press release. Mitchell used to program
jazz on CBC radio. This is his first big
private sector foray and, so far, it looks like he and his partners are
going about it all right.
Puretracks also said it would start selling prepaid cards at major retailers
like Zellers and Mac's convenienc stores. That's smart, too.
Puretracks says its catalogue now exceeds 250,000 tracks from Canadian and
international artists on both major and independent record labels.