Puretracks

» see puretracks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

puretracks was canadian, and in the download-store years that mattered more than almost anything else. these shops were fenced in by licensing, one country at a time, and a turkish listener was outside every fence. for years the itunes store itself would not sell to a turkish account. a canadian copy of the same wall was just a wall in a different country.

it launched on october 14, 2003, spun out of moontaxi, a toronto outfit that had been streaming music into shops and onto air canada flights. the press called it canada's itunes and for a while the name fit. it sold a million songs in its first four months and held its ground even after apple opened a canadian itunes store in late 2004. in february 2007 it did something apple would not do for years, it dropped the copy protection and started selling ordinary mp3 files.

bell canada bought a majority share and used puretracks to power its sympatico music store, which was the beginning of the end of it as its own thing. by the early 2010s the download was already a dead format walking, replaced by streaming, and bell had no interest in building a canadian spotify to chase it. neither did anyone else in the country. puretracks closed in august 2013, and canada stopped having a music store with its own flag on it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the drm break ~

the one thing puretracks genuinely got ahead on was killing copy protection. in february 2007 it became the first major north american store to sell its catalog as plain mp3s, months before amazon's mp3 store and well before apple cleared drm off itunes. for a canadian site that mostly followed apple's lead, it was the one moment it led.

~ what got buried with it ~

what went down with puretracks was the idea of a national music store, a canadian shop for canadian listeners run by a canadian company. bell could have kept a version of it alive as a loss leader and chose not to. after 2013 canadians bought and streamed from the same american services as everyone else, and the notion that a mid-size country might run its own storefront quietly stopped making sense.

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