> > I was recently intruduced to eMusic, who offer a flat-rate subscription ($10/month) for an unlimitied number of downloads. Their catalogue isn't great and licencing issues mean that music belonging to certain labels can't be downloaded outside of the US, but it seems to be a step in the right direction.
> >
> > winter"used the free trial and unsubscribed. Is that ethical?"mute
>
> Doesn't sound too bad. I really want something like the Apple iTunes Store -- $0.99 a song, big catalogue and practically no "digital rights" crap built in. You can burn their stuff to CD or transfer to a portable player all you'd like. There are certain services emerging, such as CDBaby.com, that promise to help get unsigned acts onto iTunes Store. That could be really cool.

eMusic doesn't use digital rights management; you download unadulterated MP3s.

> A subscription model is also a neat idea. $10 a month certainly isn't a bad price, but it seems a little cheap to get the big labels to go for it right now.

Yes, there is that. But hopefully it's a model that will take off in the near future. If the big labels can be convinced that it's better for them to make a small amount of money whenever someone downloads a song on the Internet than to make none...

wintermute