Early Review: Online Music Purchase Sites

Updated 10/23/03

In this review:

• EMusic.com
• BuyMusic.com
• MusicMatch
• iTunes for Windows

A slew of new online music sites has popped up recently, and I've been playing with them.  Here's an early review.

My Recommendations

MusicMatch and iTunes.  However, iTunes did a very bad thing to my iPod, which I'm pissed about (see below).  EMusic.com and BuyMusic.com are not on my list of sites I'll return to, and I'll explain why below.

EMusic.com

EMusic was very recently sold off by Vivendi Universal, and their policies have changed since I was a subscriber.  They used to provide an "unlimited" download service for a flat fee of $10/month.  (Now, it's 40 tracks/month for $10, 65 tracks for $15).  Their tracks are unrestricted 128k MP3's.  Their selection is in the 200k-300k tracks range, and they have relatively little mainstream content.  They have a lot of musicians you've never heard of, if you get my drift.

However, I was intrigued by the concept: I signed up for 3 months.  I downloaded a lot of tracks (the 30-second previews often don't give you a good idea of the song, so anything that sounded reasonably good I'd grab it, and delete later if I didn't like it).  No problem, it is an unlimited service, as stated in my agreement, right?

Wrong.  I, and many other top downloaders, get a nastygram in e-mail, accusing us of doing bad things.  After we all flame them back, they issue a sheepish apology and tell us that 2,000 tracks is the limit, the magic number they didn't bother to tell us when we signed up for "unlimited" service.  I dropped them once my 3-month subscription was up, although to their credit, they did give me the opportunity to cancel immediately for a prorated refund.  I figured at least one of us should uphold the contract we entered, so I stayed on until the 3 months was up.  Frankly, I had pretty much exhausted their content anyway, and wasn't finding any new songs I wanted.

(For the record, they must've used a number much lower than 2,000 to initially determine who their "abusers" were.  There's no way I downloaded 2,000 tracks in a month.  If I had to guess, I'd say I downloaded somewhere between 450 and 600 tracks over the entire 3 months.  I've kept probably less than 30.) 

Their selection, quality, and use restrictions appear to be about the same as when I was a subscriber; what's changed is they've scaled way back on the number of tracks you may download for your $10.  However, their experience, music quality, and lack of DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions on their tracks are a plus.  They lost me as a customer, but their service is not without some advantages.

BuyMusic.com

This is one of the more recent entrants.  They're a spinoff from buy.com, the popular web retailer.  They use Windows Media Player, and all their tracks are DRM-restricted .wma files.  Their selection is comparable to the other sites, about 300k tracks.  Their DRM restrictions are typically 1 computer, 3 burns, and 10 transfers to a WMA-compliant player.  There's a good review at CNet.com that's more complete than mine.

Beware: Your iPod or Other Player May Not Work

Note: if you don't have a WMA-compliant player, you can't transfer the tracks directly.  (My Windows iPod, for example, is not WMA-compliant.)  However, if you burn the songs to CD, then rip them with MusicMatch or one of a dozen other packages, you can create completely unrestricted MP3s.  (See 'Burn and Rip Workaround' below.)

BuyMusic.com had a significant number of tracks that did not have 30-second previews.  Also, some songs may only be purchased as part of the entire album, and their interface doesn't provide 30-second previews there either.  This makes it very difficult to tell if you're going to like the song, now, doesn't it?  I doubt they'll have many sales of those tracks.

One other thing I should mention: some thieving prick recently obtained my name, address, and credit card number, presumably off the internet.  BuyMusic.com was one of 2 sites that I had newly used that credit card at.  Now I'm not saying that my credit card info was stolen from there, but I'll tell you I'm sufficiently paranoid not to go back.  It was a new site, and I've read other complaints of site instability.

BuyMusic.com also has more tiered pricing than the other sites.  Everybody else charges $0.99 for each track and $9.99 for an album; BuyMusic.com charges anywhere from $0.79 to $1.29 per track, with similar tiering for albums.  Their DRM restrictions are not consistent, either; some tracks may be burned 3 times, some 10. 

MusicMatch

One of the most popular MP3 software packages for years, MusicMatch has recently gotten into the track sales business as well.  You have to update to version 8.1.  It's pretty well implemented.  The track preview quality is pretty good, although the previews are often slow to load.  As with the other sites, MM batches up any songs you purchase over a 24-hour period into a single invoice, so you don't have a bunch of individual $1 charges on your credit card.  Their selection is similar in track count as the other services.

If you're already a MM user, you'll probably like their implementation.  Tracks are automatically added to your library as they're downloaded.  One annoying thing: as with BuyMusic.com, the tracks are DRM-restricted .wma files (see 'Beware: Your iPod or Other Player May Not Work' above).  You can't even change the track tag info.  For example, I like to rename the artist sometimes ('The Crystal Method' to 'Crystal Method').  You can't change the restricted tracks in this way.  Again, as I explain below, burning the tracks to CD and then ripping them to unrestricted MP3s can get you around this problem.  Of course, then you wind up with 2 copies of everything in your library.  This is an inconvenient, messy workaround that I wish the industry wouldn't impose on us.  Look, we're paying for the music, alright?

I did have one purchasing glitch, where a track's price showed up as 'undefined.'  The purchase and download failed, and nothing weird showed up on my credit card.  Overall, though, MusicMatch is pretty good.

iTunes for Windows

Apple's ad says that 'Hell froze over,' and they've written the 'best app for Windows ever.'  Yeah, their Marketing people probably need to switch to decaf, but it's not a bad implementation overall.  I did have some problems that almost turned me off iTunes completely.

Here again, about 200k-300k tracks available for purchase at $1 each, just like everybody else.  iTunes does DRM restrict their tracks, in ACC (.m4p) format.  1 computer, 3 burns of an unchanged playlist, and 10 downloads to an AAC-capable player (like the iPod).

iTunes Breaks All Other Software

If you're an iPod for Windows owner like me, one thing you should know: iTunes for Windows will break all other software packages that you might use to manage tracks on your iPod, including the MusicMatch plug-in and XPlay.  They sort of warn you about this when you install the software, but it appears to be irreversible.  Factory-formatting the device might fix it, but I stopped short of that.  XPlay runs, but no songs show up on the device.  You are forced to use iTunes to manage your tracks for evermore.  This really pissed me off.

So, I'm left with a $30 copy of XPlay which is now shelfware.  At least I was able to figure out how to get around the problem; my iPod is the only place I ever listen to music, and without the ability to manage it, it was a showstopper for me.

Note to older iPod users: your existing firmware may not support the AAC format, so you may need to update your iPod.  I discovered this the hard way; iTunes simply wouldn't let me drag tracks that I had just purchase over to my iPod.  I could drag MP3s over, but not the ones in .m4p format.  Updating my iPod firmware to 1.3 (I have the older touch-wheel iPod) fixed the problem.  Took me a while to figure it out, though...

Anyway, iTunes' preview tracks seem very good.  Their server performance was spotty at first, but I just read that Apple sold over 1 million tracks in the first 3 days, so that might explain it.  A more recent purchase was much faster.  The purchasing experience was nice, as it was on all of the sites.  One nice thing: if you've already created an account at apple.com, it works here too -- you just need to attach a credit card to it.  One other thing I like: they implement the 'people who bought this track also bought' thing like Amazon, so if you like a track, it makes it easier to find other stuff you might like too.  I really like this, and rely on it to find stuff.

Burn and Rip Workaround

All sites, with the exception of EMusic.com, try to implement some Digital Right Management (DRM) with their tracks.  The tracks are encoded to work in conjunction with specific players.  The player enforces how you can use the track.  Typically, they restrict

• the number of times a track may be burned to a CD
• the number of computers it may be played on
• the number of times it may be transferred to a compliant portable player

Each site has different restrictions, although in general, it's 3 burns, 1 computer, and 10 transfers.  And one thing to note: if your portable player (iPod, Nomad, Rio, whatever) is not compliant with their scheme you are shit out of luck.  The tracks simply will not work there.  Except...

...that any of these restricted tracks may be burned to a normal CD, and then ripped back as normal MP3s.  Now I am not suggesting that you do this, because in some cases, it may violate your license agreement.  I'm merely pointing out a fact.

This seems really dumb to me that you'd have to go through extra steps and waste a 30 cent piece of plastic just to get the songs onto your player, but that's the reality.  There's also some loss of track quality when doing it this way.  However, if you have an iPod and want to buy tracks from BuyMusic.com or MusicMatch, this is the only way to get them on there.

Summary

Overall, I like what I'm seeing with these music services.  The price is fair.  However, selection, convenience, user friendliness, and stability have a long way to go.  This is the first round for these services, so I know they'll get a lot better over time.  I'm encouraged that music lovers and the recording industry just might have found a way to work together.