emusic anyone?

[space-time]

how is the quality? their prices seems reasonable, i.e. about 33 cents or less per song, the only catch is that it's a "subscription", but still, if you spend 10 bucks a month at the iTMS, for the same money you can get 30 songs at emusic.

I'm about to sign up for a trial account, but I'd like some feed back first... Thanks

[Harbourmaster]

I have several hundred songs from eMusic and the quality is excellent.

IIRC they use VBR so depending on the complexity of the track you can see a big difference in bitrates.


Take some time to browse through the catalog, lots of non-mainstream stuff.

[tahoedrew]

I've gotten in on their "100 free downloads" offers at least twice, which means I've got at least 200 files from emusic. As Harbourmaster said, they use VBR encoding, so it's very good quality!

~A

[space-time]

then why are they so far behind iTunes in terms of market share? they seem to sell good quality DRM-free music for 33 cents a piece, while iTMS charges 1.29 for the same stuff, am I missing something???

[$tevie]

Because Apple has managed to become the Microsoft of music downloading. I think a lot of people think "legal downloads" and "iTunes" are synonymous. eMusic needs a much bigger advertising budget. :-)

[Chupa Chupa]

The prob. with eMusic (at least for me) is there catalog is pretty limited.

[ztirffritz]

I think that they recently got a chunk of EMIs catalog since they removed the DRM. They are second behind iTMS for market share, but iTMS has about 70% of the market IIRC. The quality is good, selection is good too but it isn't maintstream stuff. I use it pretty often. They just raised the prices, but since I've been a long time subscriber I kept the old price. I get 40 downloads per month for $10 I believe.

[Harbourmaster]

eMusic is great for Indie Rock older Rock/Pop, Jazz, Classical, NewAge/Ambient stuff.

Like I said take a good look around their catalog and you will know if you want to spend money with them.

[michaelb]

I have had emusic for the past year and have been very happy. I am thinking of dropping it for a while though, 3 or more new albums a month is a lot of music to keep track of and listen to. The listings are limited, but there seems to be plenty there to download for me.

[evilrobot]

I like the indie selection that emusic has and join periodically. Google "100 free emusic" or something like that. If nothing else, get your free ones and jump out if it isn't your thing. I think it's a great service, but sometimes need to take a break from it to let the selection refresh a bit.