EMusic
If you visit many music websites you’ve seen their red, white, and grey banner ads promising 50 or 100 free MP3’s from EMusic. It’s no joke. And, franky, I think it’s the best internet music deal going. If these folks would have been going strong years ago during Napster’s prime (or AudioGalaxy or Kazaa), none of the current P2P mess would have happened.
EMusic is Napster done right, for the indie crowd. No digital rights management - you own the files, so you can do whatever you want with them. And the files are high-resolution 192KB VBR MP3, so they sound good. They have the rights to the entire Matador catalog (Pavement, the Pixies, Belle and Sebastian) and an ever-growing selection of indie rock, country, and jazz. For bluegrassers, they just added David Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label - lots of goodies there.
I’ve always felt that micropayments are the wave of the future. You pay a penny for every song you listen to. The artists you actually listens to make money. It eliminates the idea of a risky purchase and compensates artists that people choose to listen to. But the reality is that the technology needed for micropayments to work is simply not there yet. The closest thing we have are the tethered subscription services like Napster-to-go, though these, too, are still frought with problems.
EMusic is the next best thing. You commit to a small monthly fee ($10-20) and that is your music budget. Fair enough. That subscription gets you a fixed number of downloads per month. You queue up files in your account and as the month ends you use up your remaining download credits. This encourages risks, provides a sensible means of controlling your personal music budget, and there is no technology there to fail. You own the music.