eMusic

Having just bought myself a Rio Karma with my totally unexpected, but most welcome, Christmas bonus I've started paying a bit more attention to downloadable music. I'm not sure why I noticed now particularly given that I've been moving all our music over to a jukebox over the last year anyway.

Anyhoo I found eMusic thanks to a Guardian article on legal downloads and browsing through discovered that they have exactly the kind of music I didn't expect to find actually being sold. e.g. A large number of Fax records. Plus their introductory deal is 50 free song downloads.

The odd thing is that after the free intro the paying deal is $9.95 for 40 downloads a month (plus a couple of higher downloads for more money). Now this is a very good deal - compared to the rip off 99pence a track that most outfits are standardising on - but if you want to download more you can upgrade to 90 tracks for $19.95 but beyond that you can't go. Now I guess their catalogue isn't so huge and so you'd probably exhaust what you were interested in pretty quickly at that rate. But it still seems an odd model to me.

So a big thumbs up to eMusic (so far). After all any outfit who even has an Electronic/Krautrock section is off to a good start.