On Oct. 14, 2003, I found myself upstairs at the Hard Rock Cafe in downtown Toronto to witness history. Or so I was told.
Music piracy was out of control. Napster started it in June 1999, and while it had been sued out of existence by the fall of 2003, dozens of peer-to-peer programs popped up: Gnutella, Audiogalaxy, Satellite, Scout, Kazaa, Morpheus, BitTorrent, eDonkey, eMule, Bearshare, Grokster, LimeWire, and several dozen other file-sharing programs were in the wild. The music industry was in a panic.
Sony tried to get into the game of selling digital music, but the hardware division was at odds with the music division, which made its download store clunky and unusable. They then partnered with Universal to create a digital storefront called Duet, which was soon rebranded Pressplay (stylized as “pressplay.”)
It, too, was clunky and awful, restricting how purchased files could be used and transferred. Meanwhile, EMI, AOL/Time Warner, and BMG had a collaboration called MusicNet. Again, a major fail.
Music consumers would have none of either of these services. Why spend money on music that came with all sorts of restrictions when Kazaa could deliver virtually any song for free? And besides, no one knew or cared which label had which artists and songs. If a digital music store was going to succeed, it had to be a one-stop shop for everything.
And while the majors considered banding together to build a single collaborative site, that sort of thing would have never passed muster with antitrust laws in North America and the EU.
Apple offered the industry the best lifeline with the iTunes Music Store, which had gone online in April. As a third party to the music industry, Apple and iTunes had nothing to fear from trust-busters. But more importantly, it had the iPod, which worked flawlessly with iTunes.
Things got even better for Apple with the introduction of the iPhone (2007) and the removal of all digital rights locks on music files, starting in January 2009. Legally-purchased music could now flow like water.
Eventually, iTunes would control 70 per cent of the global digital music download market despite much competition. Microsoft tried to counter with MSN Music, but that failed by November 2006. Yahoo! Music Unlimited was dead by 2008.
And does anyone remember Buy.com? What about Walmart’s music store? No? Both are long gone.
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Back to that afternoon in October 2003. The host of the event was Puretracks, a digital music storefront billed as “Canada’s iTunes,” and an offshoot of an earlier company called Moontaxi, which also supplied in-flight audio entertainment for Air Canada. Approximately 175,000 music files from all the big labels were for sale for 99 cents (or less), the same as iTunes. But even more sexy was that iTunes had yet to debut in Canada.
The event culminated with one of the founders (it was either Alistair Mitchell or Derek van der Plaat) pressing a key on a computer, downloading a legal digital song in Canada for the first time. I wish I could say what the song was, but I don’t remember.
At first, the site did boffo business, selling about a million songs with the first four months. Even after iTunes opened up in Canada in November 2004 — 13 months later — Puretracks continued to do well. Zeller’s, Shoppers Drug Mart, and various convenience stores sold pre-paid Puretracks card. There were massive advertising campaigns and partnerships. Bell Canada bought a big stake in the company in 2006, and used Puretracks technology to launch the Sympatico Music Store.
Puretracks’, um, tracks were in the MP3 format — a first for North America — offered with a resolution of between 256 and 320 kb/second. Yes, there were DRM locks, but they’d fall away by early 2007, more than two years before iTunes did the same. Puretracks users could seamlessly transfer their music from their computer to their desktop to their digital music player to wherever, regardless of the operating system and with no penalty. There was even a special hookup with BlackBerry, the biggest mobile device maker of the time, to create a special music store for users. Advantage: Puretracks.
The library constantly grew, jumping to 250,000 songs and ultimately to more than three million by the early 2010s, a number that included a sizeable amount of French and Latin music.
There were other projects, too. You might remember Puretracks-powered kiosks in select record stores and bars where you could create a custom-burned CD right there. This was one of the few physical manifestations of the Celestial Jukebox, an idea that had been around since the late 1980s. Any song from anywhere, burned to a CD, just for you.
Puretracks had first-mover advantage over iTunes and all its other competitors. It sold millions of tracks. Public visibility was high. But then one day in the summer of 2013, it just… vanished.
By the end of September, the Puretracks URL no longer worked. Its Facebook page was down to 300 followers. No one had posted anything on Twitter for weeks. Fans of the company were ghosted. What happened?
According to Cam Gordon’s new book, Track Changes: The Origins of Canadian Music on the Internet (1990-2010), it appears that Bell, the majority stakeholder in Puretracks, no longer had any kind of enthusiasm for the product. Streaming had become the main source of music distribution and consumption, and neither Bell nor any other Canadian company had any appetite for getting into the streaming business, especially with the absence of any DRM locks.
Bell had tried to bundle downloads with its internet service, but no one seemed to care. They also tried selling digital music in two tiers, but with subscriptions running at $14 and $16, that was way too high compared to competitors. Canadians simply moved to foreign companies like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and all the rest.
Canada could have had its own Spotify if Puretracks had been fed and watered properly by an owner willing to play the long game. Alas, all our streaming dollars are now flowing out of the country like water.
