ryan kennedy’s blog

Ever since switching to a Mac, I’ve been looking for a replacement music service. I had been using Yahoo! Music Unlimited, which I love. Unfortunately, it’s entirely unsupported on a Mac (don’t you dare tell me to use Parallels). I think Yahoo! and all the other companies doing subscription-based services kick the living hell out of iTunes. Seriously, why spend $1 per song where you can only listen to that song on an iPod or a PC? You could spend $10/month and have access to several million songs from Yahoo! instead (plus Yahoo! will let you listen to it on any PlaysForSure capable device of your choosing). If the price were the same, what would you rather have, 10 songs a month or several million songs a month?

Anyway, as I said, I’m looking for a new music service. All of MP3 looks like the best service around, that is…until you realize that it’s a Russian company pirating music. They purchase CDs and then rip them into the collection and resell the tracks online for bargain basement prices. Even though the long arm of the RIAA doesn’t seem to be able to do anything to stop them (for now), I’m pretty sure they’d have no qualms about going after their customers in the United States. Additionally, I’m nearly positive no revenue generated by All of MP3 is going to the artist. So even if I could get away with using All of MP3, I won’t.

So given all of these choices that keep getting shot down, I continue coming back to eMusic. I like two things about eMusic: 1) they’re legal and 2) there’s no DRM. That means I can do whatever I want with the music. I can burn it to a CD, I can throw it on an iPod, I can drop it on a Creative Zen, I can play it on my PC, etc. It has a pricing model more like iTunes where you pay for a subscription that gives you a certain number of downloads per month, so I’m not 100% in love with it, but I think I’d be willing to pay the extra money for DRM free tracks.

Unfortunately, eMusic has a HUGE problem in my mind…they won’t let you browse the selection without signing up. Granted, they have a free preview, but you still have to give them a credit card number. How am I supposed to figure out if their selection has enough to make me want to pay for their subscription? Every other service I’ve seen will let me browse their selection for free, so why won’t eMusic? Are they afraid that nobody would sign up if they realized how slim the pickings are?

I am willing to concede that it may be possible to browse the eMusic selection without signing up (I swear I was able to do it once before). However, I can’t seem to navigate their site to anything resembling a music catalog without having the sign-up form pop up. If someone else knows how to look over the collection without signing up, please let me know.

Also, if you have an alternative music service that’s supported on the Mac, let me know. I’m talking about music services where you can actually pick the track you want to listen to, so services like Pandora (which I already use) don’t count.

Update: Thanks to the efforts of mookie, I have the answer to the riddle of the hidden eMusic catalog page.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Unfiled. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.