iTunes Canada Crawls Onstage

Matt Good comments on the launch of the iTunes Music Store for Canada:

For those of you that have been waiting for the launch of the iTunes Canada store, it’s finally happened. And in true Canadian Music Industry fashion, it’s a total mess.

The launch of the store is what the industry refers to as ”a soft launch”, meaning that it’s a work in progress – or the CMRRA and Apple couldn’t get their shit together prior to it going online. Of course, Canadians have complete access to the same music that can already be found in other countries, they just have to keep checking back to see if those Canadian bands that they like have been added. I would say something witty, but when it comes to Canadian music, this sort of nonesense is just to be expected.

I have bought a couple of things from the store already, but I have found it to be quite lacking in selection. I purchased the exclusive Tragically Hip single, but found that there are only three other Tragically Hip albums on the store. (I believe the Hip have almost ten studio albums.) The greatest irony here is that there are more Hip albums available from the US store where hardly anyone cares about them.

I hope they figure things out and add more of the missing music.