Emusic appreciation post...

[vi5]

I had inquired about this on here last week and only got 2 responses, but I ended up signing up for the service anyway. $14 a month and unlimited downloads. As a fan of indie rock and punk this is a veritable treasure trove. A lot of great indie labels have their stuff up and I could easily find a few hundred full albums that I wanted and was considering buying anyway.

The funny thing about this is that I feel more guilty about overusing a service that I'm paying for than I ever did with the "free" services like kazaa, napster, etc. (which I've stopped using).

I know the artists get paid with eMusic but it seems like so much of an honor system that I actually feel bad about abusing it.

Luckily a lot of the stuff is things that I had on other formats that I had been looking to upgrade.

The only downside is I think they infested me with pop ups. Luckily I got the google toolbar which seems to be blocking most of them.

[NWHarkness]

1. I've had EMusic for a long time

When I first signed up I downloaded literally hundreds of albums. Eventually, it got to the point where I know I have whatever I want n the back catalog and just peruse the new releases every week or so and get maybe one or two a month. So it evens out over time.

[vi5]

2. I keep thinking there's something I'm missing....

It seems like too good a deal for it to be fully on the up and up. I mean I know the labels obviously have to approve this but it's just such an amazing deal. I guess they realize that people are going to do it anyway so you might as well get something from them in the process.

[Caution]

3. Grab Mozilla Firebird

I use it pretty exclusively and I didn't even know that emusic has pop-ups!

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/

Vast improvement over Internet Explorer (I was a mosaic user, than a netscape user through v3.0 then IE 4.0 came out and blew away the competition. I finally moved to Mozilla Firebird about 4 months ago and it is a vast improvement over IE 6.0) Easy to use, easy to install, the tabbed browsing really makes it worthwhile as well as the native popup blocker.

I'm glad you are loving emusic, you are the third peron in a month i've recommended it to.

[madfloridian]

4. Emusic is a great site.

I don't have many pop-ups. I have mentioned it once or twice on here, but not a single response.

For the kind of music we like, everything from classical to the "Brother where art thou" style bluegrass, to Louis Armstrong/Bing Crosby to Rock and Roll......it is there.

If you try to download too much, you will get a letter from them I hear. I don't download a lot, probably a couple of albums a month.

I am making family picture cd albums, and adding music to them. I like that I can find very old music there and just download a song instead of an album. I can use music from my parents/grandparents' era.

Leo Laporte on Tech TV mentioned it, and he likes the site very much. It is legal because there are no artists without their permission.

Have you tried the message boards? They offer superb help in finding hard-to-locate music.