Delicate Genius Blog

I am so loving this trend – A DRM free music buying experience!

Yahoo! is trying it, and now I learn that eMusic is doing it too.

From USA today:

Then there’s eMusic and its more than 1 million songs, which do play on iPods — and the company isn’t shy about letting customers know. “Get 25 free iPod-compatible downloads just for trying us out,” eMusic says in its current TV ad.

Like Napster and Rhapsody, eMusic is a subscription service. Unlike those of its competitors, eMusic customers fully own the songs after downloading, with no restrictions. How does it do that? EMusic’s songs are unprotected MP3s, which means they play on any device. Rivals sell copy-protected songs aimed at preventing unauthorized trading on file-sharing networks.

…

Consumers are responding: EMusic has quietly climbed into second place to iTunes, albeit with an 11% market share to iTunes’ 67%, according to market tracker the NPD Group. The company sells monthly subscriptions, and those numbers have doubled since December, to 200,000. The company averages downloads of 5 million songs monthly.

Ok, so they don’t have anything from the 4 major labels, which is a shame and may not change (hopefully it will). But still, independent artists rock, and you might very well be surprised, artists who aren’t on major labels can play great music too, go on – give it a try.

-dg