By Karen Bliss, Toronto

Brooklyn, NY-based TuneCore has expanded its music and video distribution service into Canada. The site, www.tunecore.ca, is exclusive to Canadian artists. The music is priced in Canadian currency and there is no currency conversion on domestic sales.

The site, which advertises “keep all your rights; get 100 percent of the royalities [and] and exclusive iTunes artist ping page,” now offers all Canadian artists the opportunity to get their music out worldwide on various digital sites, such as iTunes, Amazon and Spotify.

Artists upload their music and art to www.tunecore.ca, select their stores and pay an annual flat fee of $9.99 (CDN) per single. For albums, they can choose to pay $49.99 (CDN) annually or $4.99 (CDN) a month.

Canadian digital distributor IDLA (Independent Digital Licensing Agency), which was organized by 20 Canadian independent labels, charges all its members a 9 percent administration fee and pays royalties monthly.

Hundreds of Canadian artists already use TuneCore, either via the U.S. site or the new Canadian site. Drake distributed the single “Best I Ever Had” through TuneCore, and Barenaked Ladies, Martha Wainwright, Joel Plaskett, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Melanie Doane and David Usher (of Moist) are all clients.

According to the press materials, TuneCore is the world’s largest music distributor, placing more music into iTunes and other music services in one month than Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI combined in a year.

Among that music are songs by Aretha Franklin, Nine Inch Nails, Jay Z, Joan Jett, Beck, Cheap Trick, Moby and Frank Zappa, but TuneCore artists also represent over 60 percent of all new artist sales in the US, according to the press release, selling over half a billion songs and earning over US$250,000,000 in 3.5 years.

Worldwide, TuneCore has more than 700,000 account holders.

Canada’s Cherelle Jardine with Indie band Stone Poets