So you want to bulk up your music library. But frugality won’t let you pay full price for CDs from the music store (especially since you want only one or two songs from a particular artist anyway), while honesty won’t let you partake of free pirated music from Internet exchanges like Morpheus.
The solution? Log on to EMusic (www.emusic.com), and for as little as $9.99 (U.S.) a month, you get to download an unlimited number of tunes — even entire CDs with a single click — from artists on more than 900 independent record labels. You won’t find top-40 pop from companies like Sony or Warner, but you can choose from big names in jazz, classical and alternative rock, as well as oldies, like John Coltrane and Liona Boyd. There are even hard-to-find historical recordings like guitarist Andres Segovia’s sessions from the 1920s and ’30s.
Unlike pirated downloads, all the files on EMusic are high quality, so they sound crystal clear when you crank them on your computer, MP3 player or MP3-compatible DVD player. And because EMusic is completely legal, the royalty police won’t say boo about it.
From the November 2002 issue.
