Consuming the music
Archived in 2022
Originally posted on 16 Jul 2007
A few months ago I resubscribed to eMusic. I’d been a member years ago then left because they changed their pricing structure. Since I’ve been back it’s become my primary source for all new music. When I hear an artist I like I run to eMusic and look it up. About 80% of the time the artist is represented there.
Back in the good ol’ days you’d pay one low low price of about $20 a month and be able to download as much as your harddrive can hold. Yeah, that pretty much rocked. Those twenty-six gigabytes of jazz that I have? Mostly courtesy of eMusic.
Now you pay $20/month and can download 75 tracks. It both rocks and sucks at the same time. $20 is far less than I’d be spending at Amazon for the same music. But on the other hand 75 tracks a month isn’t nearly enough to sate my appetite for new music. Especially since I’m one of the minority of online music buyers who buys at the album level rather than cherry-picking tracks. This eats up the quota pretty damn quickly in a month. Once my monthly track quote rolls over and opens up again for a month, I typically use all 75 tracks in under ten minutes. Still, I need more.
What to do?
Using a different email address and credit card, today I set up another eMusic account. Another $20/month; another 75 tracks. That’s a total of 150 new tracks of music a month. The “track rollover” dates are staggered by two weeks, which ought to allow me to consume music at a rate which will prevent the splurges at Amazon which were so common previously.
The albums picked up today using my newly minted account:
- Buckethead: Electric Tears
- Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band: XXL
- Hillbilly Hellcats{.broken_link}: Our Brand
- Michael Manring: Soliloquy (dream guitar moment: Michael Manring and Tim Reynolds, live without a net)
- The Mar-keys: Damifiknow! (The Memphis Experience)
- Tom Waits: The Early Years Vol. 2
- Austin City Limits Music Festival{.broken_link}: 2003 Collection
Not a bad lineup, if I do say so myself. It’s been a day overflowing with meetings and tasks so I haven’t been able to listen to a lot of it yet, but I have faith this new batch will fail to suck.