I have been on a quest. A quest to find a good (legal) music service with the following criteria:
- Software needs to respond when I click buttons. It needs to be well designed and not take more than it's fair share of RAM.
- There needs to be lots of popular music, aswell as lesser-known artists.
- I can't afford 79p a track ($1.50, I might add) which is what most/all "buying" services charge. So there needs to be some kind of subscription service.
- The price cannot be more than £14.99 per month.
So I took a look around. I've tried
emusic (
http://www.emusic.com) and here are my thoughts on that:
Overall, a nice setup. Web-based, but the selection of music was just too scarce for me to consider it properly. I got a few little-known UK artists from it, but they were about all I could recognise in terms of artists. I used the free, two-week trial where you get 50 free downloads. BIG ADVANTAGE: NO DRM!
I have used napster in the past, and here are my thoughts on that service:
Selection of music is great. The software and customer support - isn't. The software is so resource-hungry on my system it became unbearable. It was even bad on my 2GIG RAM, AMD64 system. Ouch.
In terms of customer service, it was dreadful. I have had to ring them twice as they charged my card twice, two months in a row. They never apologised. They never sought to rectify the situation. They simply said "call your bank".
But I have found a new service, from Virgin! (Richard Branson & Co)
The software is smooth, fast and efficient. The amount of tracks available (1.4 mil I think) is astounding. They have a subscription service, and it's in the price range (£9.99). There is radio. There is playlists. There is music insurance, so if your system fails, you don't lose any of your music when you reinstall VD (Ooops, just realised what that says!).
It current is only available to UK and US residents. For more information, check out
http://www.virgindigital.com .
A screeny: