While iTunes has been available in the US and Europe for some time now, they have finally got around to launching their Canadian version. This comes a few days late after its announced deadline.
Their Canadian service offers a catalogue of 700,000 tracks priced at 99 Canadian cent each and albums at $9.99 Canadian. While the US pricing is also 99 cent a track, due to the exchange rate difference iTunes Canada works out at ~16% cheaper than the US version. To compare with its European version, iTunes where sold at 99c Euro works out at ~$1.56 Canadian and iTunes UK works out at iTunes most expensive pricing at ~$1.81 Canadian. GristyMcFisty submitted the following news via our news submit:
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Originally scheduled for a late November launch, ITMS Canada's absence yesterday prompted Apple to admit it had missed its slot. "We said that we would launch the iTunes Music Store in Canada by the end of November, but we're going to miss this deadline by a bit," the company said in the statement sent to MacCentral. "You'll hear from us very soon." Indeed, the store went live last night. Songs are priced at CAD0.99 ($0.84) album-length batches are sold for CAD9.99 ($8.44) and up. Apple most recently opened an English-language store for a number of European nations, following its successful launch of individual online shops for the UK, France and Germany in June. ITMS US launched in April 2003. As of 15 October, ITMS worldwide had shipped 150m songs since the US store's launch. The next store, due to be opened sometime in 2005, is believed to be ITMS Japan. An Irish store is also thought to be in preparation. Some more info available here. |
It is interesting to see iTunes sticking with their 99 cent price in Canada considering that it means a much greater loss per song compared with the US. Then again, it seems like 99 cent is their main policy to go for, although with the exception of the UK.
Feel free to discuss and find out more about iTunes on our Music Downloads, P2P & Legal Issues Forum.
Source: C|net News - Music
Canada has always had among the lowest music and DVD movie prices in the world. I think it is a quirk of the distribution models or something. Sadly I still can't use iTMS because I live in a rural part of Canada on 28.8 dialup 
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