eMusic: Another music service with a vowel in front of a word.

My Sunday seemed to be progressing as normal. Wake up, move a couch, enjoy a Shamrock shake, watch Olympic hockey. Everything was quite pedestrian until I heard a catchy ad coming from my idiot box. “25 free songs compatible with iTunes and your iPod with your free eMusic trial membership.” Since I’m very impressionable I dropped the dish I was washing and ran to the computer trying to figure out how this deal would screw me. I sat down and started the process. Sure enough this looked legit, sign up for a trial membership and get 25 free downloads. I loaded the software and off I went.

eMusic specializes in independent labels so it’s certainly the anti-iTunes in that respect. Unfortunately it’s the anti-iTunes in many other ways. Complain about Apple all you want but they do know how to design their software. eMusic utilizes a download manager that gives little info and their web page is slow to refresh and often didn’t give me an accurate read out on how money songs I had left to download. It was also time consuming to preview tracks as you had to download a 30 second sample and wait for it to play as opposed to iTunes which buffers a stream straight from the site. On the plus side I was able to find some rarities that I didn’t know existed and try some new music I might have held off on if I was being charged. Also it was extremely easy to cancel my trial membership and abscond with my free tracks.

In the end though my thoughts went back to iTunes and the simplicity and ease with which they work. I recently read that Amazon is the next company that’s going to attempt to get in on the online music world. They should save the money their probably planning on using for free downloads and step aside. At this time iTunes is the king and it will take a lot to knock them off their throne.

(While you’re waiting for that to happen I’d still take a wander over to eMusic and get your free songs. Not sure how the musical stylings of Jan Hamer from Miami Vice count as “independent music’ but for free I’ll take it.)