Before Apple Music, There Was MapleMusic—Canada’s Forgotten Pioneer

Music, technology, innovation, and culture. Fast declines, tech rot, digital decay, and electronic waste. The first four have been with us for decades. The latter four are newer but very much still on the ascent. A 2024 Pew Research Center analysis found that 38 percent of web pages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible, highlighting the impermanence of most online content. Most tech and digital experiences fade in plain sight when humans are distracted and shifting their screen time elsewhere. Others linger somewhere amid the clutter.

Technology’s twenty-first-century reshaping of music (and reshaping of everything) was largely led by California companies. The impact of Apple alone has been unimaginable, led by the iPod, iTunes, and Apple Music. YouTube is basically the most popular music platform on Earth, offering millions of songs at a hard-to-beat price of $0. MySpace, founded in Irvine, California, was short lived but fundamentally altered how musicians connected with fans. Further up the coast in Seattle, Amazon disrupted multiple retail models and claimed a major share of the CD and vinyl markets in the process.

Several tech start-ups from outside the United States also played a role in the digital music revolution. These included leading streaming services such as Spotify (Sweden), Mixcloud (United Kingdom), Deezer (France), and Tidal (Norway).

On a global scale, Canada didn’t play much of a role in this tech music makeover. Research in Motion (RIM) was our top tech breakout of the era. However, the company that brought us the BlackBerry was generally more focused on productivity, not entertainment.

But a wave of Canadian music tech start-ups did help reformat how Canadians found and listened to music. In the shadow of Apple, Google, and Amazon, these companies sold CDs, music downloads, merchandise, and more. Combined, they impacted music distribution in Canada and normalized new consumer behaviours for the streaming and e-commerce platforms that dominate today.

Skydiggers are an institution in Canadian music. For decades, the Toronto roots rockers have been a staple of summer festivals, frosh weeks, and theatre circuits in small towns across the country. Yet frontman Andy Maize once stepped away from his musical roots to help launch one of Canada’s first major start-ups focused on music and the web.

MapleMusic was founded by Andy Maize, his brother Jeff, and a trio of Canadian tech entrepreneurs: Mike Alkier, Evan Hu, and Grant Dexter. Part e-commerce platform, part distributor, and part label, MapleMusic provided a range of services to a few dozen Canadian artists. Its goal was to promote Canadian music to online audiences and convert a portion of those fans into paying customers. Dexter eventually took on the role of president.

The seeds of MapleMusic grew out of a late 1990s industry event, attended by Alkier and the Maize brothers. The trio struck up a conversation about the lack of artist-friendly distribution channels for Canadian talent. Alkier had previously spoken to management consultant Dexter about the growing potential of e-commerce. Combined, there seemed to be an opportunity for a new business venture.

At the time, Jeff Maize was managing Skydiggers and was eager to rethink how distribution worked for artists of their stature. File sharing was on the rise, but this was still very much the era of the compact disc, when music was viewed as both a physical entity and a high-volume commodity. For most artists below the superstar tier, the cost of marketing and distributing CDs remained a constant challenge. Paired with the looming threat of widespread digital piracy, the Maizes and their partners decided the time was right to try out a new model.

MapleMusic.com launched in 1999, led by Grant Dexter, Mike Alkier, and Evan Hu, with both Maize brothers serving on its board of directors. The site operated as a sub-brand within MapleCore, a broader organization that would eventually include entities such as Umbrella Music (a Canadian music “webzine” acquired by MapleMusic in 2000) and MapleSolutions (a design and IT services provider).

In hindsight, the venture was bold in ambition and wisely ahead of its time. MapleMusic wasn’t a distributor, and at the time, it wasn’t a record label either. Instead, it positioned itself as an intermediary between Canadian artists and their audiences, working to remove the barriers that kept Canadian music, merchandise, and content from reaching fans at home and abroad. MapleMusic offered a focused, elegant platform for musicians to connect with listeners and move some product in the process.

“Music was a bit like the canary in the coal mine for many other content industries around the time we started Maple,” says Dexter, reflecting on the early days of MapleMusic. Now spending much of his time working on projects in the blockchain space, he notes that the chaos driven by file sharing hit the music industry well before it reached other forms of media.

“Movies and books weren’t being affected by the internet in any big way in 1999, at least in terms of money or generally how people were consuming them. There was no social media to speak of. Streaming video was very limited. But in other ways, you could just feel that we were on the verge of this explosion of e-commerce that would shake up not just how we buy music but how we buy anything. That’s what we knew was on the horizon.”

Sarah Harmer, Cowboy Junkies, and Martha Wainwright were among the artists who sold music and merchandise through MapleMusic in its early days. Musicians could use MapleMusic.com as a distribution platform without being directly affiliated with the organization. The set-up functioned like a more personal, more localized version of third-party e-commerce sites such as Amazon Marketplace or eBay.

MapleMusic expanded its ambitions in 2002 by launching MapleMusic Recordings, a traditional record label with releases available both on MapleMusic.com and through major retail channels. Essentially, what started as an antidote to HMV was now selling products at HMV and other major retailers. This move allowed the company to scale and helped introduce several new artists to the market.

Lindsay Lynch was MapleMusic’s operations manager for three years in the mid-2000s, helping run its website and other key duties. She says the organization took a high-touch approach with their artists, supporting them in many ways beyond making money.

MapleMusic used innovative tech tools to give artists, management, and industry partners equal access to real-time sales and inventory insights. A shared database made this process transparent and real time. Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google brought these kinds of products to the mainstream years later, but at the time, it was quite the unique set-up for all involved.

“We had a secure portal that artists could log into and pull inventory reports at any time,” says Lynch. “Of course, [this portal] was helpful to help ensure their online stores were always stocked, but it was also a useful resource when planning merchandise orders for tours. It could show what was selling well and what wasn’t, which could help inform what kind of stuff to take on the road. These were all discussions artists and their teams could have within minutes of logging in. MapleMusic.com offered an important touchpoint with the fans, and that can’t be undervalued.”

During its first decade, MapleMusic expanded in several directions. New ventures included Open Road Recordings, a country music label that was once the Canadian home to Taylor Swift, as well as a boutique label called Pheromone Recordings. MapleMusic also launched TicketBreak, an online ticketing platform. It sold passes for events, ranging from NASCAR races to minor hockey games, and attractions, such as Toronto’s Wild Water Kingdom.

While each MapleMusic expansion had varying levels of success, the quality of artists remained consistent throughout. Top names such as Carly Rae Jepsen, Gord Downie, Spirit of the West, and the Dears all worked with MapleMusic at one time or another.

The organization continued to mutate in subsequent years. Dexter split as president and chief executive officer in 2014, and MapleMusic eventually rebranded as Cadence Music Group in spring 2016. Cadence has also moved in many directions, adding a brand called Fan Experiences that offers fan engagement via online hype campaigns. Past clients of the latter have included Maritime hip-hop star Classified, Sarah McLachlan, and English punk/folk shouter Frank Turner.

The company operated more like a start-up than a traditional music label throughout most of its existence. So, while MapleMusic didn’t establish a definitive blueprint for Canadian music tech success, it did offer a proof of concept that blending creative talent and tech expertise with a flexible, innovative mindset could produce a sustainable business model, both in Canada and on the international stage.

Even as the first dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, Canada was nurturing a new community of innovators eager to experiment with computers, music, and tech. Puretracks, a homegrown mainstream alternative to iTunes, was arguably the most visible music tech outfit in Canada for a few years.

Puretracks debuted in 2003 as an online music store, offering Canadians thousands of downloadable songs for $0.99 or less. The service was an offshoot of Moontaxi Media, a company that specialized in online streaming music and media. In the early 2000s, Moontaxi were the ones pumping tunes on your Air Canada flight or into your local Beer Store. With Puretracks, they also wanted to take up space on your iPod.

If you were a Canadian music lover at the time, Puretracks advertising was unavoidable. You may recall wacky imagery from Puretracks print and out-of-home ads. Puretracks prepaid gift cards began popping up at various big-box retailers. These big promotional budgets looked to boost Puretracks’ brand awareness. iTunes wasn’t yet in Canada when Puretracks launched, so there was great urgency to get out there and cash in before Apple came to town.

The labels were on board as well. Universal, EMI, Sony, and several indies had signed licensing agreements with Moontaxi, signalling industry confidence in the platform. With a foundation in place, co-founders Derek van der Plaat and Alistair Mitchell were poised and well positioned to serve Canadian music fans.

“Our business model never saw music as a product. It saw music as a service,” says Mitchell. “Keep in mind, when we were starting Moontaxi and, later, Puretracks, there wasn’t really a lot of venture money on the ground in Canada for this kind of project. You really had to bootstrap it or, otherwise, just go the full Napster route and hope you hit a vein in terms of reaching a critical mass. For Derek and I, we really had nothing in common with the kind of rebellious approach you often see in the digital space. We were very copyright sensitive, and we knew that the record labels mattered.”

As a business, Puretracks’ focus was mass market. According to a 2004 Globe and Mail article, fans had downloaded 1 million songs from the service within its first four months. With prepaid Puretracks cards available at Shoppers Drug Mart, Mac’s convenience stores, Zellers, and other mainstream retailers, there was evidence of a growing market for safe and legal music downloads in Canada. By the time Apple brought iTunes northbound in November 2004, Puretracks had already established a footprint, driven by advertising, partnerships, and simple user experience.

Legacy media companies were starting to look at music and digital for alternate revenue streams as well. This led Bell Canada to acquire a majority interest in Puretracks in March 2006. This agreement strengthened Bell’s music offerings within its media portfolio and built on a prior agreement between the two companies from 2004. That deal enabled Bell to launch the Sympatico Music Store, a service powered by Puretracks that gave fans access to 250,000 downloadable tracks.

Sympatico.MSN.ca was Bell’s primary web portal at the time. By 2006, the site was attracting around 17 million unique visitors per month, or 83 percent of Canadians who used the web. Enthusiasm for new media was clearly on the rise. The challenge was now to make these technologies more accessible and appealing to audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Bell took a step in that direction in February 2007, announcing that Puretracks would begin selling music as MP3s without digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. This meant files could be freely shared, burned, or transferred between devices without limitations.

The move set Puretracks apart from iTunes and other services still constrained by DRM. With more Canadians managing music across laptops, phones, MP3 players, and tablets, dropping DRM restrictions offered a new level of convenience and flexibility. “DRM was clunky, and it created friction in the buying process,” says Mitchell. “It annoyed the customer. It’s like putting a lock on the bike, and it was definitely an impediment to the user experience. At that time, it made sense given the climate and the newness of getting your music digitally, but at the end of the day, why would you put limitations on your service you’re offering when it could be acquired elsewhere without those limitations?”

In 2008, Puretracks took things a step further by launching a DRM-free mobile music store exclusively for BlackBerry users. Co-developed with Magnet Mobile Media, a Toronto- and Scotland-based interactive marketing firm, the Puretracks Mobile Edition was unveiled at South by Southwest (SXSW), a festival in the epicentre of music, tech, and digital culture.

To its credit, Bell was faster to embrace a DRM-free future, even as Apple, Sony, and Microsoft kept their ecosystems locked down. Within a few years, the DRM debate became irrelevant as streaming platforms and YouTube emerged as the primary way millions accessed music worldwide. This completely changed the model of music ownership and caused the value of both CDs and MP3s to plummet.

Bell was now more focused on bundling music with internet, television, and mobile services as a fulsome new media experience. Given this integration, Puretracks was quietly sunsetted as a standalone brand in 2013. The Puretracks offering was now just a fraction of what Bell offered on the music side.

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While Canadian services like Puretracks were positioning themselves to take on iTunes, Zunior was carving out a more specialized niche. Launched in 2004 by Dave Ullrich, drummer of Kingston-based indie rock duo the Inbreds, Zunior functions as both an independent label and digital music store; from the outset, it has offered DRM-free MP3s and full albums, the latter typically priced at $8.88 or less. The model has resonated, and Zunior has maintained a steady market presence to this day.

Zunior’s roots trace back to the late 1990s. The Inbreds disbanded as a full-time project in the summer of 1998. With his touring days behind him, Ullrich shifted gears, enrolling in a computer programming course before moving into a career in project management. There, he developed a growing interest in open-source principles, particularly how they could be applied to music and distribution models.

“For years when I was in the Inbreds, I was selling CDs and visiting the post office way, way too often,” he says. “I knew I didn’t want to do that anymore. So the concept was pretty simple: find a way for myself and other independent Canadian musicians to find an easy way to release music digitally.”

Unlike Puretracks, Zunior was never a capital-heavy venture, and the site itself began as a side hustle. “The goal was to find a bootstrapped, open-source way to pull this off,” says Ullrich. “We looked into a bunch of existing frameworks that were out there, and we came across something called OsCommerce, which was one of the early e-commerce software programs. From the start, there was no money, no venture capital, just time—a lot of time. It happened gradually as we added features and functionality to it. We eventually were able to pull off a store!”

Over the years, Ullrich and his team have brought a personal, hands-on approach to their digital presence. While Zunior operates entirely online, it also embodies a grassroots spirit, reminiscent of indie labels, like Sonic Unyon and Mint Records. A quirky, independent energy has always been at the core of Zunior’s identity.

Unlike Puretracks, with its mass-market ambitions, or MapleMusic, with its constantly evolving business model, Zunior has remained focused and consistent over the years. Operating at a cozy, sustainable scale, it has quietly become a true legacy brand in Canadian music. Zunior also helps fill notable gaps in Canadian content, offering music that larger streaming services often overlook. Ullrich notes that a 2010 EP from Molly Rankin remains a perennial bestseller and serves as a perfect companion to her later work as the lead vocalist for Toronto fuzz-pop mainstays Alvvays.

When asked why Zunior has endured, Ullrich is humble: “I do feel that people who came up in the independent world and have stuck with it, there is a real sense of having each other’s backs and supporting each other. In a weird way, Zunior has become a bit of an archive where you can still find items you won’t find elsewhere. Our feet are still firmly planted in the energy of 1990s and early 2000s independence. I feel like we’re still a tiny corner of a much bigger, much more important story. I’m good with that, and it’s why we’re still doing it.”

A Government of Canada study found that by 2018, more than 4.6 million Canadians had subscribed to paid music streaming services, a number that has only grown in the years since. Meanwhile, platforms like YouTube and TikTok have continued to dominate as leading sources of music discovery.

In an age shaped by algorithms and global platforms, labels like Zunior play an increasingly vital role in preserving and promoting Canada’s musical identity. They serve as digital sanctuaries for homegrown content often missing from mainstream services, and they reflect the heart, humility, and independence that have long defined much of Canadian music.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Track Changes: The Origin Story of Canadian Music on the Internet by Cam Gordon, published by FriesenPress, 2026.