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

Homegrown start-ups were ahead of American giants in transforming our listening habits

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.

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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........

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