If you’ve been keeping up-to-date with this blog you’ll have an idea what emusic is about. If not then let me give you the long slow version, then perhaps you’ll pay more attention in future!
It was a dark and stormy night and I was browsing the net, as I tend to do when most people are sleeping, when I came across a website called eMusic.com. Now, being the cautious net browser that I am, but also one hankering after a bargain, I bored myself looking through the terms and conditions of their offers. They basically have two deals… sign up to a trial membership and get 25 Free MP3s or take a 1 month paid membership and get 50 MP3s. Now, as one who finds the idea of paying for music a strange one, my immediate reaction was to click away and cleanse my eyes with either some free porn or free music however I liked the idea of 25 FREE MP3s so…
For the benefit of you, my loyal readers, I kept on at it and can break it down to this. The site is pretty good. I has a shit load of music available. Unlike iTunes, you pay a regular monthly subscription which entitles you to a fixed amount of downloads, obviously the more you spend each month the cheaper the downloads work out to be. The artists page has a lot of good information and links to Wikipedia so when you find an artist you like you don’t have to go searching in other browser windows to find out more on them it’s those little touches that make me almost consider paying for music!
So, were there any catches to the trial? Nope… I punched in my card details to activate the trial, downloaded my 25 MP3s as well a load of free stuff they have…did I mention that they have 100’s of free MP3s as well? In some cases you can download a free track from an album, a bit of a taster and in other cases you can have the whole album however from what I can gather the entire albums are mostly made up of unsigned artists so they can be a bit hit or miss but… it’s free so if you don’t like you can simply delete. What is quite good is members add reviews and some of them don’t hold back! Anyway, on the last day of my trial I clicked the button that said Cancel Membership and that was it! No form to fill in asking why I wanted to cancel, just a confirmation that it was over and the music I had already downloaded was mine to keep…
All in all I was pretty impressed, I liked it much better than iTunes, the files downloaded really fast, were high quality (320kbps) and you could even sort the naming convention to suit your needs so that you ended up with folders and tracks in your preferred style…again, those nice little touches! Now, as I’ve admitted I generally don’t pay for my music so eMusic.com generally doesn’t offer me much but if your conscious doesn’t allow you to enter the murky world of torrents, I would highly recommend eMusic.com and even if you do use torrents, just go take the 25 Free MP3s and bask in the warm glow of satisfaction you’ll get by being able to smugly tell people you’ve legally downloaded your music :)
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