eMusic was established in 1998 with the aim of catering for the music needs of listeners that like independent music.
The web site currently holds around 600,000 tracks from both well-known names and new artists and really can claim to cater to the majority of musical tastes.
The site was the first of its kind to offer MP3 formatted tracks – this means that every audio download you make is yours to own forever. There are no DRM (Digital Rights Management) issues here. This is a perfectly legal service and all artist and label rights and payments are fully taken care of – but you’ll never find your digital music expiring with this site. You can, quite literally burn to CD as often as you like, make as many copies as you like and load your MP3 player up time and time again.
This just isn’t an option with many other download services – once you’ve used a download in a specific number of ways with many other sites you’ll have to re-purchase it to access its full functionality again. It also means that the service will work with most any MP3 player including the iPod – iPod users are often shut out of non-Apple download sites so this is a bonus for them!
eMusic also claim to be the first download service that offered a subscription model for your music purchases. This is a great service – the basic option costs just $9.99 a month and you get a whopping 40 downloads for your money there. And, you can cancel your subscription whenever you like – you are under no obligation at all.
This is a site that never sits still. Loads of new artists, albums and labels are added on literally every day. And they also have an exclusive deal with music venues across the US to produce their own eMusicLive recordings. The only problem with this is that it can be hard to search through the site quickly to find music you’ll want to download sometimes as there is so much on there. The site gets round this to a certain extent by highlighting recommendations and similar artists and there’s an active online community to help you out and give you real tips if you need them.
You also need to be aware that you won’t necessarily find a huge number of major names on this site. The whole bias here is to promote the artists and bands that are signed up to independent record labels. Some major artists are, of course, signed up to ‘indies’ so you’ll find them on the site but many aren’t so don’t expect to find many stadium fillers available to download at the moment. You may also find that your location may play a part in what you can and cannot download.
Some labels, for example, will restrict their download access to specific countries – so a user in the US may be allowed to download an album that a user in Europe cannot and vice versa.
If you’re an independent music lover then there is no reason not to try out the site. The company is so confident about their services that they offer a no obligation free trial. You can basically join the trial and download 50 tracks at no cost. If you don’t choose to sign up after the trial is done then you can keep the downloads forever and you won’t have to pay out a single dime! Even if you do choose to join you’ll still have got hold of 50 free songs – just think how much that will save you!
One tip if you’re trying to negotiate all the music on the site is to visit regularly. That way you can check out what’s coming into the site and keep up to date with the catalog. This is real easy to do – just click on New to eMusic when you arrive at the site and you can manage your search from there.
One other tip worth considering is to download the site’s toolbar software. If you do this you get a load of features, your searches will be easier and you can also download an extra free track every day!
Also see music download services for more details.