I haven’t bought music digitally yet, but I’m thinking of giving it a try. What digital music stores would you recommend for smaller band/indie kind of stuff? My requirements are that the songs are non-DRMed and preferably in mp3 or ogg format.
eMusic: MP3s, decent quality and no DRM. They’ve got of Montreal and other
cool stuff. Some rare bands may actually not be available for download in their home
countries due to weird distribution issues, but the store’s library keeps growing.
They are subscription based in a way; you pay one of several prices for X number
of tracks to download per month. You own those tracks, and can re-download
them if need be, but every month the number of downloads available are reset.
You can’t carry them over.
If I send you an invitation through the site, and you decide to subscribe, I’ll get
another bunch of free downloads :)
A second recommend for eMusic.
It took me a little while to get into their catalog, but after a few months me and my girlfriend are still having no problem pulling down our entire quota.
I’m still on the old pricing, so it doesn’t hurt so much during the ‘dull’ months.
I get 90 downloads, and will at least use 60. Sometimes I get a huge backlog in
my “save for later” box :)
iTunes Music Store does not meet your requirements, but it’s the one I recommend, as it gives me (as an artist) $0.6375 per $0.99 download.
If anyone can beat emusic for price, let me know. I just wish they had more labels in the catalog.
I subscribe to Urge to stream a huge catalog of music to my PC, and when I find the ones I want to keep, I download them via emusic.
Also, for ala cart pricing, like iTunes, Audio Lunchbox has pretty much the same selection as emusic, and the same price as itunes.
I download in spurts, so a subscription plan would leave me with wasted tracks a lot of the time.
My favourites are beatport.com and bleep.com, but they may not have any music to your taste, dealing mainly in electronica. Both are DRM free, and beatport offers optional wav downloads instead of MP3s.
Hmh. Audio Lunchbox seems pretty nice, but they are only for US customers. eMusic pricing seems to be $9.99/mo for US and $17/mo for Europe for the exact same plan. I don’t think our VAT should almost double the prices…
Where do you get $17?! I pay the dollar price for their top plan.
In Europe, it costs over $20 for 75 songs a month from emusic?
I’m on the $20 plan, getting 90 downloads per month, and paying only the $20.
Well, if you choose “eMusic Europe” from the main title page, it lists the more expensive prices. Not sure if it verifies it in anyway or if you can just register via the eMusic US link.
What, there’s a European link? :)
I think it may be a side-effect of me living in a non-EU European country, maybe.
How do you get 90 downloads a month? Share the s3kret! Are you signing up with fake trial accounts?
I signed up before they changed the number of downloads per month.
If you have a time machine, so can you!
Wow. eMusic is pretty much exactly what I’ve been looking for since I got my iPod last month. Thanks for the tip, folks.
damn, forgot to post this earlier:
i am not sure if they check if you bought a rca mp3 player but 100 free first month.
Look what you just did, russell. You broke eMusic…
eMusic Temporarily Unavailable
We’re very sorry but eMusic is unavailable at the moment. Our engineering team is working to correct the problem as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience and apologize for this inconvenience.
BUY MY CD
Or at least, buy “The Scotsman Unbound.” Or “Jeremiah (Joy to the World)”