If Aeroplan needs a theme song for its new music downloading service, a great choice would be the Bachman-Turner Overdrive classic, “Takin’ Care of Business”. So says Rob Carrick of The Globe and Mail. In a recent article he states, “It costs Aeroplan more to provide its members with reward flights than services and merchandise, so encouraging people to substitute tunes for travel makes good financial sense. As for Aeroplan members, they get much better value for their points for reward flights.” He goes on to compare the cost of using your points for songs or flights. In the new Aeroplan music store, he points out, you get 50 songs for 6,000 points. The cash equivalent for those songs would be $49.50 at 99 cents a song. If you earned your points by spending with an Aeroplan credit card, one mile for one dollar spent, each song would reflect $121 spent. If you compare that amount with the likely cost of a flight from Toronto to New York ($358 roundtrip) at a flight award redemption level of 15,000 points, your expenditure is just under $42 to generate $1 of award value. “Aeroplan, which is run by Aeroplan Income Fund, has said the share of non-airline reward claims rose in the second quarter of this year to 11.9 percent from 8 percent in the same period last year. Non-flight rewards are obviously clicking with people, and it has to be said that there’s a practical side to this trend. If you never accumulate enough reward points for a flight or can’t seem to get the flight you want, then by all means use your hoard to buy some songs, a magazine subscription, movie tickets, a blender or even the two-metre-long serpent puppet brought to you by Aeroplan.”

We wrote about Aeroplan’s new music store in last month’s InsideFlyer. Aeroplan members can create accounts and download music by redeeming 6,000 Aeroplan miles for a 50-song music code at http://www.aeroplanmusicstore.com