Canada once had its own digital music store. Do you remember it?

[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]

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 for a while, Canada had just that.