Emusic.com

A question from a reader:
Do you have any experience with or thoughts about emusic.com? Even with the complaints by people who que up 200 albums at a time finding the downloads less than unlimited, I am tempted to try it out.

My response:
Yes, emusic.com looks interesting. I’ve read various reviews of the for-pay music services and most of them don’t add up. This one appears better in a few respects. What gives me pause (and why I won’t be signing up for the service) are two things. One is the monthly fee. Monthly fees are a ploy for companies to keep you shelling out $. It would make a lot more sense to have a fee-per-usage. If you want to download 200 albums, fine. But you’ll pay more. If you don’t download anything, you pay nothing. The other thing I don’t like about this and some other services is the low quality of the recordings. Emusic.com MP3 files are 128 Kbps which is the absolute bare minimum. Okay for listening in the car, but not much else. It’s not much of a benefit to be able to burn the songs to CD when they’re such poor quality.