Monday, October 27
Online music stores are in the news a lot lately, due to the launch of iTunes for Windows and the rebirth of Napster, but there's one store that is highly underrated: Emusic. Have you visited this site? Well, you should, especially all of you out there who are railing against corporate music. Emusic is a subscription music service ($10 US per month) that features thousands--THOUSANDS--of albums from independent record labels. Once you pay your $10, you can download as many albums as you'd like and use them in any manner you might like.
Now, there are rarely any new albums available at Emusic, but if it's a year or so old, you're more than likely to find it at Emusic, especially if your taste in music falls in the indie spectrum.
What kinds of artists are available? How about this: everything by Belle and Sebastian (except Dear Catastrophe Waitress, which was released a week or so ago); the bulk of the Mille Plateaux and Ritornell catalogues; Sonic Youth; Pavement's entire catalogue; Tom Waits; The Fall; Big Star's #1 Record/Radio City; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Little Richard; The Kinks; Augustus Pablo's East of the River Nile and King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (in fact, the entire Shananchie catalogue); and on and on and on and on. It's wonderful. True, there's plenty of crap here--like any record store--but the gems make this service very worthwhile.
Additionally, most of the mp3s on the site are formatted in high res: 180 kbps or higher, which is a hell of a lot better than the 128 available at places like mp3.com (though the AAC encoding used by Apple's store is superior).
So do yourself a favor. Before you go out and buy an album, check emusic.com first. If they have it, you can get it for free because they have a 50-song "trial subscription" thing. It'll be worth it--believe me.
Now, there are rarely any new albums available at Emusic, but if it's a year or so old, you're more than likely to find it at Emusic, especially if your taste in music falls in the indie spectrum.
What kinds of artists are available? How about this: everything by Belle and Sebastian (except Dear Catastrophe Waitress, which was released a week or so ago); the bulk of the Mille Plateaux and Ritornell catalogues; Sonic Youth; Pavement's entire catalogue; Tom Waits; The Fall; Big Star's #1 Record/Radio City; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Little Richard; The Kinks; Augustus Pablo's East of the River Nile and King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (in fact, the entire Shananchie catalogue); and on and on and on and on. It's wonderful. True, there's plenty of crap here--like any record store--but the gems make this service very worthwhile.
Additionally, most of the mp3s on the site are formatted in high res: 180 kbps or higher, which is a hell of a lot better than the 128 available at places like mp3.com (though the AAC encoding used by Apple's store is superior).
So do yourself a favor. Before you go out and buy an album, check emusic.com first. If they have it, you can get it for free because they have a 50-song "trial subscription" thing. It'll be worth it--believe me.
