The introduction of do-it-yourself CD-burning kiosks in five Ontario locations in mid-March might be described as a win-win-win-win situation.

Participating in the test run are Edward's Record World, Seneca College and the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, CD Plus in Oshawa and CD Warehouse in Ottawa.

The novel kiosks were developed by Puretracks, Canada's first digital music download service.

Their installation was a joint project between the Canadian Independent Record Production Association (CIRPA) and the Ontario Media Development Corp.

A Puretracks kiosk

It was a win for Puretracks, says co-founder and co-CEO Derek van der Plaat, because the "revolutionary technology" that produced the CD-burning kiosks is not just one more pioneering coup.

It was also the tip of a huge iceberg of opportunity.

In a rollout slated to begin this summer, the current five kiosks will start soaring to thousands placed in hundreds of diverse locations. And the initial 5,000 homegrown songs by Ontario artists will rise to a projected one million multinational works, many of which are currently unavailable in record stores.

"Our grander vision," van der Plaat says, "is to place what we call stand-alone record stores in not only retail locations but also airport waiting lounges, gyms, resort hotels, cruise ships, bars, restaurants (in Canada and elsewhere).

"Really, there's an untold number of places where they can live."

Who are the other winners in the venture?

For music lovers, the high-tech gizmos bring a new and inexpensive way to compile CDs containing only the tracks they want, plus the ease of doing so without their computers and in locales where they typically have time on their hands.

For the independent Ontario record labels and musicians whose work was chosen to be among the first 5,000 tracks available during the test run, the kiosks bring increased exposure and a trickle of revenue.

One of the reasons for CIRPA's involvement was the opportunity it provided to promote Ontario music, says Donna Murphy, vice-president of operations. "We hope that the kiosk technology will prove to be a viable new delivery service for Canadian music for a variety of non-conventional artists provincewide.

"This has the potential to vastly expand the distribution potential for Ontario artists and companies given today's extremely limited retail opportunities to reach record consumers," Murphy says.

For CIRPA and the Canadian Recording Industry Association, the kiosks add one more weapon to the arsenal they're currently using to battle illegal downloading and filesharing that has hurt music industry profits.

It's no accident that record stores are among the first venues to try out the CD-burning kiosks and that others are expected to follow suit, even though logic suggests they might draw customers away from a music store's cash register.

What will actually happen at record stores, says van der Plaat, is that the kiosks will act as tools to improve their stock and delivery capabilities. "Over the last two or three years, most mainstream record stores have put (higher revenue-producing) DVDs front and centre and reduced their stock of available CDs to the point where they're probably averaging only 5,000 or 6,000 per store.

"Having a kiosk could not only increase that number to, say, 30,000, but they could actually take the place of whole departments (such as) classical music or jazz," he says, allowing record stores to tailor inventory and concentrate on stocking the biggest money-makers.

Customers at one of the test-run record shops showed curiosity about the kiosks during their first few days in operation, says David Maldoff, general manager of Edward's Record World. "But they said they were a little confusing to operate and complained about them taking only credit cards, not debit cards."

Both those criticisms are already being addressed, says van der Plaat. On-screen instructions on the kiosks may be improved and Puretracks will soon send "helpers" to the kiosk locations on a rotating basis "to not only help people understand how they work, but also to recommend music and assist them in finding the music they want."

And in future versions of the kiosks, van der Plaat says Puretracks "will be making it easier to pay, possibly with debit cards and certainly with our prepaid cards, which we already sell in more than 2,000 locations."

Ease of payment won't be the only new technology added to the kiosks down the line, he says. "We've started out with pretty basic functionality in that the kiosks just burn CDs. But we've also built in ports that will eventually enable the transfer of digital music instantly to players or to wireless (devices), so you could just point a phone at a kiosk and transfer music."

Launched in Canada in fall 2003 and in the U.S. a year later, Puretracks is owned and operated by online distributor Moontaxi Media Inc., which in turn is part-owned by van der Plaat and partner and co-founder Alistair Mitchell. Canadian multimedia company Standard Broadcasting and ROW CD Plus are the other owners.

All the major Canadian record labels, including BMG Canada, EMI Music Canada, Sony Music Canada, Universal Music Canada and Warner Music Canada - as well as such smaller labels as MapleMusic Recordings and Nettwerk - have publicly expressed their approval of Puretracks' antidote to illegal downloading.

Through Puretracks.com and co-branded services with Bell Canada, Telus, AOL Canada and Standard Broadcasting, the company offers downloads of any of the 700,000-plus songs in its rapidly growing catalogue for about 99 cents each.

The price per song is somewhat higher when purchased at one of the new kiosks. Tracks can be previewed free for 30 seconds and the first five tracks chosen cost $1.39 each. If six songs are downloaded, a 10-per-cent discount is applied and a 15-per-cent discount is deducted from the initial price if 11 or more songs are downloaded. For no extra fee, a label listing the tracks chosen is printed out with the receipt.

(Terry Poulton can be reached at poulton@businessedge.ca)