A few months ago I was over at a friends house and I saw him downloading music. It wasn’t Amazon.com, Rhapsody, iTunes or any other service I had heard of. It was then that he told me about emusic.

Amazon MP3

emusic is an indie music download service. They use a subscription based service that has a few different tiers. Based on how much you pay per month determines how many downloads per month. The cheapest service is about $12 per month which gets you 30 songs [about 40 cents per song]. It is one of the cheapest services out there, but there is, of course, a catch.

emusic doesn’t have many of the mainstream artists. Instead it has contracts with many indie labels and artists. It also has a lot of older music by artists that aren’t performing anymore, including big band jazz and old classical music. If this is your kind of music, then I would say this is all for you!

I tried it a few weeks ago, but cancelled my subscription because I couldn’t find music that I wanted. Earlier this week I got an e-mail asking me to come back allowing a lot of free downloads. I decided to go back and find a lot of the obscure music that I wanted and will cancel once I’m done with a month [I have about 60 more downloads]. For the rest of my mainstream music I’m going to stick with iTunes for its ease of use and large collection.

So what do you guys use to download music? iTunes? Amazon MP3? Rhapsody? Or do you just buy physical copies? Leave your answers in the comment section!