bdrules

i'm thinking about joining, but i want to know what other people think about it. how often do they update their catalog of songs?

emanon

I think I bought a $50 GC from them a few years back in order to get a free MP3 player, and never used it...or maybe that was another site. I should try to track that down....thanks for the reminder!

chunk

I've been a subscriber there for a few years now, and absolutely love it. It's essentially the only reason that I have a cable modem. Whether or not you would find it worthwhile probably will depend on your musical tastes. If you are looking for the big names and albums, you probably will come away disappointed as the major label presence in the catalog is minimal. That said, if you find that your tastes range toward the unknown or independent, I would imagine you will fall in love with it. There is also a great good amount of oldies, jazz, country, and all types of other music. To put it in perspective, I would guess that 30 gigs of my hard drive is taken up at any given time by things I download from emusic. And I am constantly burning CDs full of stuff, at last count I think I'm up near 120 or so, with literally no end in sight.

As far as how often they update, I would say most weeks they add a good variety of new titles between Thursday and Saturday. Depending on the record label, some albums come out on the same release day as in stores, while some are delayed. Every once in a while new labels are added and make some or all of their material available.

So basically I'm giving it an enthusiastic endorsement, keeping in mind the lack of major label content. I'm quite sure that you can browse their catalog without subscribing, so I would encourage you to look around and see if they have some things you would be interested in. Enjoy.

bdrules

i was looking at their catalog and they had quite a few bands that i like, but how about the quality of the mp3s?

mike1978

EMusic MP3s are currently encoded at 128 kbs (yuck!), but they are apparently improving the quality (192 maybe?) at some point this year. You can sign up to be alerted when emusic switches to the higher bitrate: http://help.emusic.com/mi/br-nm.pl

bdrules

cool, hope its soon. 160 is my absolute minimum. 128 just doesn't cut it.

Ralph Wiggum

I was for the trial period and then I left. There was a ton of music that I wanted, but the quality was crap as said above.

redcat

I just signed up for the free trial period, and I'm pretty impressed so far. This falls right in line with what I listen to. As far as I can tell, this is not a service where you only have access to the songs as long as you're a subscriber, right? My impression is that even if I cancel after a couple of months, I'll still keep all the songs I downloaded. Just hoping some current (or former) members could confirm this.

Absolut

confirmed

darkside

I signed up for a free trial a couple of years ago and downloaded a couple of Flogging Molly albums and Reverend Horton Heat's Lucky 7s album. They just offered me 40 tracks to try it again. I was able to redownload all the old songs free and they are now 192kbps VBR instead of the original 128kbps.

I picked up the new Dane Cook and Lewis Black albums during the free trial. They have a really nice selection of Comedy albums and some really good punk and alternative. I also found several Jazz albums I want.

Considering these are unrestricted MP3s and very good quality I will probably stay signed up for awhile. 40 tracks a month is an excellent deal for $9.99.

redcat

I noticed that as well and picked up the two Mitch Hedberg albums. I also liked the jazz selection - not albums I would normally buy, but with this deal, I was going to look around for some.

printerati

Their recent (as in 2005) additions really haven't been compelling enough for me to rejoin. Most of the live and CD Baby-type releases just aren't my thing.

I grabbed a ton of stuff during the unlimited downloads for $9.99/month days, stuck with it for a few months when they dropped it to 40 downloads at that price, cancelled, rejoined at 65 downloads for $14.99/month for a few months after they offered me 50 free downloads to come back, and cancelled again.

My download history was never lost after cancellation, so I was able to re-download everything that had since been re-encoded at no charge. They could probably lure me back for a few months if they offered me another 50 free downloads to rejoin, but I haven't received that offer a second time.