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Puretracks.com Enters The Online Music Fray

Posted by timothy on from the enjoy-the-long-canadian-winter dept.

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.

4 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Patent by metalligoth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I wonder if Apple's failure to bring iTMS to market in non-US nations is due to the patent out there described here. If that is the case, given the slim profit margin in selling music online, I'd have to think any non-US ventures would be doomed to failure until either all the companies buy (eat) one another or go bankrupt, or somehow the patent is challeneged.

  2. Moaning about WMA only... by fruey · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Nobody moaned too hard when Apple launch iTunes in the US only and for Apple customers only with iPods and all. They sighed a little that they didn't have a cool iPod and would actually like something for their Windows (or Linux) machine.

    Now you're (collectively) moaning that this new Canada only service is WMA (and hence windows) only, even though there are workarounds to transcode (yeah lose quality blah blah) to MP3 or OGG good enough for walkmanlike headphones.

    Commercial stuff like this will always be led out by simple economic decisions. Like how much the whole infrastructure costs. Even if that means dopey in IT puts WMA because it's already built in to the solution they've already been committed to forever. Or whatever.

    --
    Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
  3. They don't get it... by pdaoust007 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How can they compete with mp3's that can be acquired for free, have no restriction AND can play on any platform (Windows, Mac, Unix) or portable device?

    To attract consumers to their service they must have some value added service. All I can see is less value with all the DRM restrictions and the propietary format they chose. I own three portable mp3 players (one is an iPOD) and none of them can play this WMA crap.

    Give me a true alternative to P2P applications, a reasonable price (a lot of their albums are over $10CND) and I will use a paying service for sure(I currently use eMusic but it's only good for indy music).

  4. What a joke.. by jhiltz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As a Canadian waiting for a decent music service i'm sorry to see all the limitations outlined in the review..

    It's interesting that while all the RIAA riff-raff has been going on, emblazoned throughout the media - no one has even questioned the fact that Microsoft has managed to somehow collude with all the recording companies to ensure that all the songs on any of these online services are in WMA/DRM wrapped audio format. Pretty unfortunate for all of us Linux and non-Microsoft OS users. These music services will be a success, and quietly behind the scenes I believe the happiest company involved will be Microsoft - now knowing they have yet one more thing to keep you locked to their platform. This note of course doesn't even touch on all the problems with the limitations imposed by the DRM being used for the songs off Puretracks. But anyway, enough said for now...

    Jeff