eMusic give away 50 downloads when you sign up, and then if you don’t cancel then they start charging you for monthly subscriptions. The basic package allows 40 downloads a month for $9.99.

Sounds just fine so far, but the problem is about as fundamental as it gets. They ain’t got much I want to download. They’re known for offering tracks by out of the way artists, indie labels and so on. That’s well and good, but they’ve typically only got one or two albums even by reasonably well-established artists. For instance, if they had more by Iron & Wine, or anything by Bright Eyes, I might not just take the 50 songs and run without paying them a cent.

It’s a pity, because everything else about it is great; the site’s good, the downloads are unencumbered by DRM bollocks and are a pretty good bit-rate. Oh well, never mind.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2005 at 9:27 pm and is filed under geek, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.