Dave Salvator of ExtremeTech has wrote a really great article about the current online music market, comparing the major legal platforms out there.
Considering that I sometimes really enjoy listening to some new comer bands and indie stuff and that I want the music in a form that I can listen to on my iAudio G3, downloaded from a page that I can access also without having to have a Windows system somewhere, it seems like eMusic is the only alternative to gettting music the classic way: by getting into a store and buying the CD… I actually still have some space left in my room for more CDs.
The article also mentions Michael Robertson’s platform mp3tunes.com, but as the author wrote: There seems to be not a single popular artist’s work available on there. I said, that I have no problem with paying for new comer music (since it’s most of the time better than some of the commercial stuff out there), but I still also want to have access to “pop” music.
This said, I just clicked on a “random” artist on the front page of mp3tunes and was a little bit suprised by my luck: I found this album by Collide. By luck I also picked a track that sounded somewhere in the same direction as Evanescence :D Then I continued browsing and found this “Dreamworld” album. I only downloaded the sample of track 3 but I think I will get at least this track :-)
About the samples: mp3Tunes seems to offer for every song *00 KB samples. Most of the samples I downloaded so far are somewhere between 400 and 500KB in size.
eMusic on the other hand streams their samples and they don’t offer a sample for every track.
Another thing that I like about mp3tunes is their artist information. Since most of the artists there are quite unknown (at least to me ;-) ) it’s good that they compare them to some well known artists. In the case of Collide this would put NIN and Evanescence in the list of “similiar artists”.
I’m really curious where I will eventually end. Will I still buy CDs (or similiar media) in the future or will there perhaps be some great download service where everyone gets legal DRM-free music for a fair price? Not forgetting that this service should also offer “popular” music ;-)
[via http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/portable-media/online-music-download-services-compared-039359.php]
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