More download thoughts

Well I've pretty much used up my free track download limit on eMusic so I'll have to decide whether to go for a month's subscription now. I think I probably will as there's quite a few albums on there that I'd like but unless they grow at quite a rate I'll probably be cancelling again in a few months when I exhaust what I'm interested in.

Looking further down the Guardian list I mentioned I had a look at Streets Online's offering and found a fine example of why a little more thought is needed in this business. I discovered that they are doing Tangerine Dream's Logos Live for downloads. Now like all their offerings you can put each track individually for 99p or the entire album for £7.99. Now that's a bit pricey - but typical - until you realise that Logos only has two tracks on it anyway, which makes it a bit of a bargain. In fact track 1 is 90% of the album so you can get almost the whole thing for 99p. Just to add to the nonsense you can buy the CD for £6.99. Madness.

There's actually a similar problem with eMusic due to their simple track counting system. There's a double "tribute to John Cage" CD which has a very large number of tracks on it - many less than 30 seconds long - which means that it would probably take a whole month of your top rate subscription to get the album.

Still if they fixed that, they'd probably start charging extra for long single tracks so I'd lose out there instead.