Because of the cost – especially for a lot of classical, jazz, and world music
with long tracks – you
can loosen up and explore, following up whatever is currently moving you,
checking out things
you are vaguely curious about. This is the other side of having a quota to use
every month rather
than just paying (a lot more) track by track as with iTunes, Amazon, etc. OK,
you end up rashly
downloading a few things you could do without, but you can also stretch out,
and get music that
you know is only likely to be good for very occasional listening, and some
things which will
surprise you..

The crudeness of the search function and the sometimes erratic tagging can
be time consuming
and frustrating. Curiously, this can also create a strange sort of addictiveness,
by building in an
incentive to persevere … you can discover hidden gems wrongly tagged, or
related items you
hadn’t suspected.

No doubt because of the relatively low return they give to labels and artists,
there is a degree of
volatility in the emusic collection. I have noticed that a few of the most
wonderful things I’ve
downloaded, such as Francois Rabbath, have subsequently been removed for
one reason or
another. In February and March this year I downloaded four out of five albums
of the legendary
early Borodin Quartet series of Shostakovich string quartets, and was
dismayed when I went to
complete the set to discover that it was no longer available. Interestingly, this
also leads one to
want to get things while they are there, just in case …

But on the whole, the defections are pretty few, and heavily outweighed by
regular infusions of
new material. For instance, they recently augmented their vast world music
collection with the
World Circuit label, which carries Toumani Diabate, Ali Farka Toure, Orchestra
Baobab, etc. And
just the last week they added the Enja label, with Renaud Garcia-Fons, lots of
Abdullah Ibrahim,
and many others.

In a simpler and better world, they would have absolutely everything, and it
would be beautifully
organised and easy to find. As it is, they do have a truly amazing range of
music, but the system
has quirky, organic imperfections. I very much doubt that emusic have done
this intentionally,
but the random reinforcement, whereby by regularly visiting and following up
various lines of
interest you just may discover some fantastic previously unknown or long-
craved-for music,
adds a kind of compulsive gambling element. Of the very best kind, of
course. But you have
been warned.

As for the tagging, yep; that’s a big problem. iTunes has better classical music
tagging for sure.

I buy all my classical on cd. You can get pretty cheap used ones on amazon,
you get all the album artwork (I scan it in), all the metadata on the back (you
have to manually enter it, unless the CDDB has a good entry for that one,
personally I have my own consistent format for classical that I use and have
to change everything anyway, but at least it’s right and complete, you get the
interesting tidbits in the insert, and the music is yours, forever, even if your
hard drive crashes. )