Thoughts on eMusic: the Other Music Download Site

While the iTunes Store and Amazon.com are the big players in the music download market, there’s another site that is in the game – and has been there for a long time: eMusic. You may have heard about them from their ads on the web, in music magazines, or from friends. Unlike iTunes and Amazon, eMusic doesn’t have any major labels, so you won’t find Madonna or the Rolling Stones there. For this reason, eMusic tends to be more of an “underground” site, for people who are interested in exploring the music that doesn’t get much airplay.

For a long time, I ignored eMusic, in part because of its limited number of record labels, but mainly because the way the site works, you can’t really browse unless you take out a subscription. You can get a trial subscription (see the link at the end of this article), but I never really wanted to go that route. This week, however, I decided to try out eMusic and see if it’s for me.First, if I’m interested in eMusic, it’s mostly for classical music. While I have very broad musical tastes (which you can see by browsing my site), one of my main interests is classical. So why eMusic? Two reasons: price and breadth. Start with price. I chose a plan that gives me 50 downloads a month for $15. That’s 30 cents a track. With many classical albums being 4-8 tracks, that means I can get most of the music I want for less than $3 an album. Some classical music is even longer; for example, there are symphonies that are one long track, making an album come to 30-60 cents. With my 50 downloads, I grabbed more than a dozen albums, sampling a variety of music I was unfamiliar with.

For that’s the main reason I decided to check out eMusic. It’s not that I’m bored with the classical music I know, it’s just that I wanted to explore new types of music that I’m less familiar with, music that doesn’t get much airplay. In particular, I have heard recently some Scandinavian classical music – modern and contemporary – which is very intriguing. One of the main labels for Scandinavian music, the Swedish label Bis, is available on eMusic. Other top independent classical labels, such as Harmonia Mundi, Naxos, Chandos, Telarc and Naive are also there. While this leaves out a lot of labels (especially Hyperion, a wonderful British label), it still gives me a lot to choose from.

Music files on eMusic are encoded in MP3 format at 192 kbps VBR with no DRM. This means you can play them with any music player software or hardware. Being an iPod user, this means that I can play them (unlike many music websites, who encode their music in WMA format). But even if you don’t use an iPod, you can listen to these files. Downloading an album or track is easy; almost too easy. There’s no shopping cart, you simply click a link. But there’s also no alert asking if you’re sure you want to download something; you need to be careful to not make mistakes. Downloads use a simple program, eMusic Download Manager (though you can download directly from the web if you want), which centralizes your files in a single download folder. It’s a bare-bones program that does nothing more than queue downloads. When you get the files, you can then add them to iTunes, or another music program.

There are some downsides to eMusic’s files, however. They aren’t always tagged very well. For classical music, where movements may have long names, the names are truncated. Also, they don’t come with album art. You need to copy the art files on the web pages and add them yourself to your music files. However, to eMusic’s credit, you can re-download any music you have purchased at any time, unlike iTunes where you can never re-download your purchases.

The eMusic website is very year-2000. It’s boring, poorly designed, and its search feature is limited. There’s no advanced search mode, which can make searching a bit annoying. You can search by album, artist, composer etc., but that’s all; you can’t combine two search criteria. If you do enter an artist and composer name together, you’ll get many irrelevant results. And many classical artists are listed multiple times, one version of their name with accents and another without, which can make it hard to find what you’re looking for. You get 30-second previews of all tracks, but for classical music, the first 30 seconds of a piece or movement is rarely indicative of the entire work. There’s also very little information about the music: some albums have brief reviews from the All Music Guide, but most do not. Users can write reviews and rate albums, but there must not be a lot of classical music lovers using eMusic, because as I look now at the most downloaded classical album (a free sampler from the Naive label), there are only 8 ratings. The next most popular albums have 7 and 10 ratings, and only one review each.

The site gets downright skanky when you visit its message boards. While it really needs community to make it work, this site is terribly in need of updated forums. They look like forums did in the early days of the web; they only show the last month of posts; and there aren’t that many posters. These forums could be places for recommendations – and, to be fair, there are many threads recommending music – but they are quite off-putting. Another feature, Playlists, is a better tool for recommendations. Users make lists of their favorite albums, and when you visit a page whose album is in playlists, you’ll see those playlists at the bottom of the page. You can then check out what else those people like. Users can add comments, and some do, but most don’t.

But one thing that perplexes me about eMusic. You pay per track. With my plan, a 10-track album costs $3. How much do the artists get of that amount? Maybe $2? How can they make money selling their music so cheaply? And for classical music it’s even worse; I bought several albums that are made up of fewer than 5 tracks. That’s less than a buck-fifty for albums that could cost $10 on the iTunes Store or at Amazon. How do labels make any money? I’m sure they are simply cashing in what they can, saying that it’s better than not selling, but I remain confused by the eMusic business model.

In any case, it serves a purpose to me. It allows me to sample classical music (and some other genres, such as ambient, world and jazz) at a very low price. I find it annoying to have to use up my downloads each month (they don’t roll over), but I’ve already got a long list of albums that I’ll buy to use up credits. On the other hand, it’s very annoying to not be able to get just a couple more tracks to complete an album. You can buy “booster packs”, for more than the regular cost per track, but you can’t simply go over by a few tracks and pay extra for them.

eMusic is an interesting idea, and many music fans swear by the site, because they find music they like. It won’t be the only way I buy music, but I will certainly get the most out of my 50 downloads a month. (For example, I bought several albums of symphonies by Allan Pettersson, most of which are only two tracks; almost all of his symphonies are one long movement each.) If you’re into indie music, in any genre, it’s worth trying out eMusic. The price is right, there’s no DRM, and there’s a broad selection, though no major labels. If you want to try out eMusic, send me an e-mail: I’ll send you an e-mail from eMusic so you can get 50 free downloads and a one-month trial. By signing up from this link, you’ll also give me 50 free downloads. Thanks!

Follow-up, a few later: I’m finding tons of interesting music, mostly classical (which is one of my preferred genres). The “requirement” to use my 50 downloads a month has “forced” me to download some things that I was less than enthusiastic about, but allowed me to discover music that I wouldn’t have bought otherwise. If you’re a classical fan, you really should check it out.