Well, I went to town last night with my trial subscription to eMusic, and got a boatload worth of stuff.
Total song count: 126. Yet, with all of these downloads, I still don’t have any “neighbors”, which are defined as other eMusic accounts who have downloaded the same tracks I have. Oh well, perhaps I’ll get future suggestions some other way.
Laura’s a folk, singer/songwriter kind of girl, so we looked up a bunch of stuff for her, and we got a lot more hits than misses. The more dissapointing misses were for more popular artists such as Ani DiFranco. She has but one song listed, as part of a compilation disc.
Some artists are listed, but then you click to see what albums they have, and it’s just an audio unauthorized biography disc called Maximum $bandname. Lame.
The only real concern I’ve seen so far is that you have 30 days to use your allotted downloads, as they don’t carry over into the next month. Not really a huge problem, you just have to be vigilant about it, and set some time aside to get new stuff. They make this a lot easier by including a “save for later” feature, which you can almost think of as a Netflix queue, so that if they 40 song limit catches you half way through an album, you can make a note for yourself and pick up where you left off next month.
They do sell “booster packs” for those who can’t wait until the next billing cycle, at slightly higher rates, but hardly what I’d call expensive. For example: $5 gets you 10 additional downloads, also 25 for $10 or 50 for $15.
The downloading process itself was flawless. They give you the option of an installable download manager, which saves all of the files to a directory. The artists and albums get their own subfolders, and then you can choose to have the songs named the way you like. There was no forced waiting or advertisements to wade through, and over my cable modem, the files transferred very quickly.
Once downloaded, I could just drop them into my iTunes Library, or burn ‘em to CD. Never was I hassled with licences or anything of the sort. The songs themselves come down as variable bitrate MP3, and there’s nothing special you have to do to them to get them to burn to disc or play, they’re ready to go.
Seeing that there was still much more to be downloaded, we bit the bullet and subscribed to the service, at $10/month for 40 songs. We forsee riding that out for at least a few months, filling in our back catalogs and discovering stuff we haven’t heard before. It think it could be a lot of fun.
The biggest flaw of the whole deal is that you can’t search the catalog unless you sign up for a trial account, and to do that, you have to give a CC number. Looked easy enough to cancel after the trial was up, but I guess it can feel kinda risky if you’re not sure if they have enough to support your musical tastes. The less Top 40 you listen to, the better your chances.
todd November 30th, 2005 at 9:21 pm
I still don’t see any Monkees.
How can you not like Gang Green?
m13b December 1st, 2005 at 7:36 am
Actually, they don’t have any Monkees, and even if they did… I wanted to make sure they’d still had some left should you want to download them yourself. (Yeah, that’s it.)
Feh, that’s my wife for ya. She doesn’t like a whole bunch of good stuff.