eMusic - Review
Introduction
eMusic offers an interesting combination of a subscription service and pay per track. Here’s how it works: You pay $9.99 per month and that gives you 40 downloads for that month. This works out to $0.25 per track - not a bad deal.
What’s even better is that the music that you download is standard MP3 files. This means that they work with all portable music players, including iPod. You can also burn the music you download to CDs as many times as you want, and download to multiple computers.
If you want more than 40 tracks per month eMusic offers higher subscription levels: 65 for $14.99 ($0.23 per track) and 90 for $19.99 ($0.22 per track).
Positives
- Lowest price per track: $0.22 - $0.25.
- Works with iPods and older portable MP3 players (in addition to your computer).
- Allows most flexibility of any music service on what you can do with the music you have downloaded: unlimited CD burning, download to multiple computers and MP3 players.
Negatives
- The 40 downloads per month work the same way as the minutes of most cell phone plans: if you don’t use them you lose them, they do not roll over to the next month. But even if you’re a moderate consumer of music, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding 40 new tracks that you’ll want to add to your collection each month.
- With 1 million tracks in their library it is not the largest music service out there. Click here to see if they have your favorite artists.
Current Special Offer
Try eMusic for free for 14 days and get 25 MP3s free. Even if you cancel your trial subscription you get to keep the music you’ve downloaded. Click here to sign up.
Is it Right for You?
If you want to own the music that you download and be able to load it onto your portable MP3 player (including iPods and older MP3 players), eMusic is probably the best deal available today. If you mostly play music from your Internet connected computer and you want to sample a lot of music, then an unlimited subscription from Napster or Rhapsody is probably a better fit for you.