when i wrote about the new deepelm sampler a couple of weeks ago, i stumbled upon a link to emusic on the lables website. in addition to the “buy on itunes” link there was “buy on emusic”. i never heard of it before.
as a fan of the band ride your bike i wanted to buy their new ep “the connection”. because of the stupid drm i’m not a big fan of the itunes music store. also i think 99 cents per song is still too much, compared to what you get. but that’s a different story. emusic promised to sell the songs half the price of itunes and without drm. i was curious, so i created myself an account.
first of all emusic does not sell music for money but for downloadpoints. each point stands for one download of any song you’d like. when you’re new to emusic you even get 45 additional downloads for free.
the idea behind emusic…
is that you pay for a subscribtion every month. for example i am paying 15,89 $ per month, what gives me 35 credits refreshing every month. 35 credits means 35 song i can download what means that the price of one song is about 0,45 cent. there are other plans available of course (6,49$ for 12 downloads, 11,99$ for 24, 20,79$ for 50 and so on…). the good thing is that you can quit your subscription whenever you want. month by month. once you’re out of downloads you can buy a booster pack which gives you fresh credits for a similar price.
emusic has a broad support for indie music…
and for now i’ve found most of what i was looking for. i even discoverd some rare stuff that wasn’t sold on itunes. for me the only letdown is, that you need the emusic download-manager to get you songs. i really really don’t know why they do this. they could at least let the user decide if he wants to install that software or just get a *.zip or *.rar fiile.
pro’s:
- + no drm
- + the price
- + wide support of indie music
- + some rare stuff to discover
- + 45 free downloads for newbies
- + paypal
- + you can quit month by month
- + usabiltiy
and con’s:
- - download-manager must be installed
- - subspription-model
- - you have to sign up to buy music
- - you can’t find everything
