eMusic - My Only Online Music Store
As I struggle to figure out how to properly de-authorize my old thinkpad and auhtorize my new MacBook Pro (argh), I came across an article in USA Today about the only online music store I have used in the past year, eMusic.
eMusic doesn’t have a lot of the music I want to buy so I still purchase a lot of CDs, but when they’ve got it, I always buy it from them.
eMusic is now the second most popular online music store with 11% of the market. Now considering that iTunes has 70% of that market, that may not be a big deal. But as the article points out, there are only two online music stores that sell music that can be played on an iPod, iTunes and eMusic. So that means that 81% of the online music market is controlled by iPod compatible services – not surprising.
But the great thing about eMusic is that their music is sold in mp3 format and is DRM free so you can play it on any device you own, not just the iPod. I bet we’ll see eMusic secure more and more music over the next year as the other DRM formats fail to penetrate the Apple stranglehold and I forsee a day when the labels cave in all together and sell music online in mp3 format the way the do offline today.