Left of iTunes

or Read about you band on some local blog



Recently I have rejoined eMusic. People might remember back in 1998 eMusic started with an all you could download for a flat fee business model. eMusic changed ownership and restructured their business model back in 2003. I am not sure if it was because of bandwidth costs or because of paying the artists. For whatever reason they changed to a structure where the subscriber pays $9.99 a month for 40 downloads. After waiting a year for Emusic to go back to the all you can download price model I figured it was never going to happen. I ended up joining up again.



iTunes is still $.99 a song. It looks like that price point is not going to come down anytime soon. I know that if you buy per album the person song price comes down. I still think that the real sweet point for downloaded music is .$49 a song. I think at that price is becomes more expensive to download tracks from a peer-to-peer system then it does to just pay for the song. With Emusic you are playing $.25 a song. That is a business model that I want to encourage.



I will warn you now, if you only like America's Top 40 or the music that spills out of some Clearchannel owned radio station you should stay away from e-music. They have a catalog of over 500,000 song, but there is not a Beatles, Led Zepplin, Rolling Stones, or Pink Floyd song in the bunch. That is why I say that eMusic is left of iTunes. eMusic is living on the long tail. If you are looking for Jazz, Electroinca, Old Country, Indie Pop emusic is a good place for you.



Being an obsessive music fan, I tend to attact friends that are also obessive music fans. Anyone who is a real music fan can find a few months worth of music to download from eMusic. There are so many things here you can just take a chance on. For $9.99 a month is it worth taking the chance.



eMusic has a couple more cool features. You can make list of albums that you want to download later or to show other people what to listen to. I made a list to show everyone emusic is a Sad Salvation.



I am not telling people to quit using iTunes or other music services. I am saying that it is a great service to use along with iTunes. I know that there is much that I want that will never show up on eMusic, but that does not mean it is not a service worth paying for.

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