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This article presents information related to music trade. Guitar Noise has been serving beginners and pros online since 1995 by offering free guitar lessons, exclusive interviews, tablature, advice on careers, songwriting and much more. Napster Inc. has launched a Canadian site allowing visitors to purchase music tracks online. Napster's online catalogue includes music from all five of Canada's major record labels. Save Canadian Music at www.savecanadianmusic.com is a new site recently developed to educate people on the issue and implications surrounding the announced expiry of funding to the Music Industry.

This article looks at music downloading services. Amid a long battle to combat illegal file-swapping, some of the world's major record labels are getting behind services where music lovers can collect tunes for a price. The most successful has been Apple's iTunes Music Store, which sold more than five million songs in the U.S. during its first two months of operation. The streaming audio service MusicMatch MX came on-line last September. You can't download songs but there is a choice of 10,500 artists to listen to. When Toronto-based Moontaxi Media Inc. launches Puretracks this month, it will become Canada's first legal download music service. It will have a library of 250,000 tracks that users can download, burn to CDs and transfer onto an MP3 player. Roxio Inc., makers of CD burning software, bought the once-outlawed Napster program last year and will relaunch it as a legal service this holiday season.

Discusses the development of software which gets around filters on the free-music Internet site Napster. The efforts by Napster to prevent people from trading copyright-protected music; The development of the evasive software Napcameback by University of Toronto students, for the university-affiliated company PulseNewMedia.com; Other groups which are doing similar things to avoid Napster filters.

Offers Canadian news briefs related to business as of March 19, 2001. Order by a United States federal judge that online song-swapping service Napster Inc. block copyrighted music; Intention of telecommunications company Nortel Networks Corp. to defend itself vigorously against lawsuits filed against it following its sales forecast for this year; Sale of Irwin Toys Inc. in Toronto; Plans of U.S. lumber producers to petition for antidumping and countervailing duties against Canada; News about Corus Entertainment Inc. in Toronto.

Reports on the opening of the online musicstore Napster Inc. in Canada. Rates of music tracks downloaded; Implementation of a multiyear marketing alliance with beer company Molson Inc.; Citation of court ruling on the legality of digital music downloads from peer-to-peer services.

Reports on the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) computer networks in Canada as of July 2002. Significance of the copyright battles over Napster and Gnutella; Use of P2P networking; Information on computer networks in households.