Emusic

Emusic is one of the great survivors of the online music world. Through my various online music sites I have been sending visitors their way for the best part of 4 years now - in which time a lot has happened in the industry. Many other competitors of theirs have gone under or been bought by competitors - but Emusic has soldiered on.

This is mainly due, I believe, to the way Emusic do things a little differently to the majority of legal music download sites.

After your free trial (where you can download 25 mp3s of your choice) you can then opt between 3 different subscription choices with differing costs and download limits.

Unfortunately there isn't an "unlimited" subscription offer like there is at Napster but the limits still seem quite reasonable and unless you're an ultra-high user Emusic still offers pretty good value for money.

Emusic likes to keep things simple so rather than specifying that you can only listen to the tracks you have downloaded on your PC, or only when you're online for example (as some other music download sites do) Emusic lets you do - within reason - whatever you like with your music. Listen to it from your PC. Burn CDs. Transfer it to your mp3 player.

There are, they claim, over 2 million tracks currently available from over 13,000 record labels and of course this number is increasing all the time.

The only problem in the past with Emusic was that they concentrated more on lesser-known artists and labels - primarily because this "freedom" they give their subscribers means the tracks aren't as well protected as with Itunes for example.

There *are* ways to rip the system off.

So intellectual property-protecting labels often steered clear of dealing them.

However this seems to be changing slowly with acts like Paul Weller and Josa Gonzalez among the more mainstream offerings.

It is still a site that focuses more on the offbeat, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing and there are some amazing tracks for you to uncover. Infact, that's part of the fun to me - discovering new acts and tracks you didn't know about but soon learn to love.

The end result is this - in all honesty Emusic isn't for everyone. It's not going to suit everybody out there - but it *is* going to suit an aweful lot of them. My suggestion would be to grab a free trial download (and 25 free mp3s while you're there) and see what you think.

It might be the best decision you make all year.

Take a look for yourself here.