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.