Anyone who has been keeping up with the technology news of late will have spotted that a legal music download service offering DRM free MP3 files for a flat subscription each month has been launched (BBC article here). Being a Linux user, this is the only kind of download service I could possibly use, so I took it upon myself to investigate their catalogue, music files and their download methods and give some kind of review as to if its a step in the right direction or not.

Firstly I decided that I wouldn’t sign up for the free trial; the website provides open access to browse the catalogue and listen to clips of all the music, so I figured that a glance at the subscription packages would give me enough of an indicator combined with that lot without surrendering my personal details which are required even for a trial.

My general impression of the music on offer was good. I’m a jazz fan myself and I found a wide range of jazz I knew about and a lot more I didn’t, much of it proving interesting to sample, and a fair few tracks making me wish I’d taken out the trial. There were notable holes in the catalogue though, especially for some of the more recent releases and more modern music in general. I’d definitely say it is a great place to discover new music and grab some legal copies of it, but if you are going in search of something specific, you may be disappointed.

Interface wise, the site is easy to use and cross-browser compatable. There isn’t over-use of javascript, and the default colours are easy on the eye. I mention this as browsing through and reading about music is important to me and so if you couldn’t bear to spend more than 5 minutes on the site due to design it would be a problem. Thankfully this isn’t the case and you become immersed in the music on offer, not distracted by bad layout.

The eventual method of downloading tracks (I discovered this by reading the help files, which I might mention here are simple but complete) is by client side software (software you download for the non techies). Initially this concerned me as a Linux user but a Linux client is provided and indeed there are a number of completely open source clients out there which work very nicely and put your mind at ease in the software department. Windows and Mac software is of course available as a matter of course.

From all user accounts downloads are fast and without congestion, although I couldn’t check this for myself. Sample tracks play in MP3 format at 128kbps and are 30 seconds long. There is also an option to download a .m3u playlist of all the sample clips on an album for easy listening in a player of your choice, something that sites like amazon cd shop lacks and is a nice touch. Full tracks are encoded at 192kbps VBR. This should be fine for most music, but some notable exceptions may be mainly vocal performances and classical pieces. I favor at least 256kbps for these types of tracks, but you can’t have it all and with a library of over 1 million tracks, there has to be storage to think of. Still, I do think they should deliberately encode classical tracks at a higher bitrate; when I rip my own classical music at high and lower rates I can tell the difference.

Costs for the service range from 40 songs a month for £8.99 to 90 songs a month for £14.99. As a 10 track album can cost me over £14.99 in a high street record store I consider this exceptionally good value as the files you get are unprotected and you can do everything with them you would be able to do with MP3s obtained by ripping a CD. If you wish to exceed the limit on your account you can either upgrade or for a one off time (or if you are already on the max plan) you can buy extra “burst” credits, the price of which seems to be hidden in the members only account area. I wouldn’t imagine this would be too pricey though. The only slight downside is that track allowences don’t carry over into the next month, which while isn’t a big issue means if you are into getting whole albums you may have to get half the album in one month and the rest in the next just to make sure you don’t lose out on the credits. Not a huge problem, but having half an album for a few days would annoy me - I’d rather wait and get all of it at once, but in this case that causes you to lose out.

Overall I think eMusic marks the beginning of something I have always said is the future of music online; a subscription based service with generous track number limits, DRM free music and reasonable prices making significant savings on CDs. We’re not there yet, but this venture certainly makes the first step on the road.

If you want to check out eMusic, you can do so at your leisure by visiting their catalogue