Puretracks.com Enters The Online Music Fray

Greedo writes "Two articles, one from the CBC and one from The Globe and mail report that puretracks.com has launched, offering 99-cent (Canadian dollars) downloads for music tracks. As a Canadian who wishes Apple would get their iTunes Music Store available to non-US customers, this may be the alternative I've been waiting for. Although I think they only offer .WMV files (boo)." Check out mgoyer's " rough review" of the service.

Comments

Nice, but Windows-only...ugh.

[rbrander]

I wrote them a nice note, complimenting them on the site design, navigation, organization, etc; I was even encouraging about the selection, saying that while they didn't have everything, they had more than enough to encourage at least $100 a year out of me.

Then I said, "but of course, since you only support Windows and I have a Linux box and an MP3-only portable player, I won't be giving you any business at all"...and how sorry I was about that.

Best I could do....

Canadian CD tax

[tessaiga]

Why would Canadians need an online music service when Canadians are legally allowed to make copies for personal use? The whole point of the 21-cent CD tax (PDF) over there is to explicitly allow this sort of thing. After all, Canadians are already paying an ever-increasing amount for this very privilage.

Granted, this currently only applies to sneakernet and the application of this argument to peer-to-peer networks has yet to be tested in court. This is IMHO a very important point that needs to be clarified in Canadian law for the good of the public. Otherwise, everyone there runs the risk of having to double-pay for every song they get online -- once to download the song, and once again to burn it onto CD.

Slashdotted...

[Inode Jones]

You know, maybe if they put up a simple HTML page to introduce you to the service instead of streaming video using Flash 6, the site would not be so heavily loaded...

Kinda reminds me of the Ontario Electricity Market Operator www.theimo.com. During the post-blackout period, they posted the current Ontario demand hourly. It was useful to check their site to determine if rolling blackouts were required. One problem: they ship you a 100KB background bitmap which for some reason wasn't cached by MSIE. During peak use, the server failed to keep up with the load. I wonder what they could have done had they simply dropped the bitmap for that week...

Re:Moaning about WMA only...

[tessaiga]

Normally I'd agree with you about WMA being a necessary evil to get an online music retailer launched. For better or for worse, in most countries the RIAA (or their appropriate country-specific clone) will only feel comfortable peddling their wares digitally if they can have their DRM locked into the format. Since Microsoft is a big, well-known player, I'm guessing the tendency is for the tech-phobic peeps at RIAA to reflexively go toward them (name-brand recognition) when buying into a DRM scheme.

Having said that, I'd argue that it's unfair and legally sketchy for a Canadian online company to restrict your ability to use your online music purchases. Puretracks.com makes a big deal out of being Canada-only at the moment, which means that they should be more tuned in to Canadian copyright regulation. The thing is, because of CD taxation, Canadians are allowed to make as many copies as they want for personal use. Restricting the number of copies you can make via DRM prevents you from exercising that right. Note that this is completely separate from the question of whether the personal-use argument applies to P2P networks -- with Puretracks, you've already paid to get the songs digitally.

It'd be interesting to see if anyone challenges their DRM restrictions legally based on these arguments. I'd suspect it's something they'll inevitably see this issue raised sooner or later ... Canadians haven't been too happy about the CD tax in general (especially when they see Americans getting blank CDs for free or almost free after rebate); at least before they were getting something in return for the extra price. If precendents like this continue to be set, the CD tax is just going to be free music industry money without returning any value to the consumer.

OS Limitations

[elliotj]

Ok, I tried buying a song from my tiBook, mainly because I wanted to see if I could convert from WMA to MP3 and put it on my iPod. As a Canadian Apple user I'm a little pissed at ITMS for not being available here.

When I tried to create an account and proceed to enter my credit card info, I got the following message:
Sorry, Puretracks only supports the following OS's: Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / 2003 / XP and IE 5+

It was on an .aspx page. I expect the payment part uses some active-x control that will limit you to those OSs or x86/Linux running IE in Wine. I assume they do OS detection from the browser ID.

Bummer.

What's up with people making new web services in this fashion? I mean, how much harder is it to select technology that will work on all platforms and do your development from there?

Re:OS Limitations

[Eric Giguere]

You can always have your browser masquerade as a different browser. See my page Masquerading Your Browser for details. There's a link at the bottom to a page with instructions for Mac users.

Eric

Re:Moaning about WMA only...

[silas_moeckel]

Well not to quibble but the audiophiles think CD's are of moderate quality. One of the reasons the apple iTunes sounds better is they arent ripped from CD's but rather higher quality sourced from the music studios like DAT etc. Better input generaly means better output or the ability to have better output. BTW there are good walkman headphones they cost about 300 bucks though.

Yes I'm a somewhat audiophile DVD-Audio sounds like a decent source to rip from to bad there is so little content avalible on it.

You may be an audiophile if your current sterio amp cost more than your first car :)

Re:The 'rough review'

[lamz]

Forbes has an article about the puretracks.com launch, but also mentions that iTunes is expected to launch for Windows this week!