Introduction Models Pricing Catalog Genre DRM Software Trial Period Conclusion

The Genre

All the download services dump Indian Classical music under "World" or "World/Reggae" or "International" Genre. This genre has all the music that is not in English or is not Western Classical. This makes it very difficult to browse ICM. Fortunately some of the services have sub-genre within World Genre specifically for Indian Music. For eg. eMusic has two sub-genres - Indian and Indian Classical. MSN Music and iTunes do not have sub-genres. This makes it difficult to browse through all the ICM artists in their catalog.

Ofcourse, individual artists and tracks can always be searched for.

Format and Digital Rights Management

All the services except eMusic use a format other than the open standard of mp3. The reason is that the services don't want you to be able to easily share the music you download with others over the internet. For this, they all use one of the encryption technologies to limit the number of times you can burn the music on the CD-R or the number of computers that you can store the music in etc. This kind of technology is called Digitak Rights Management, DRM for short.

iTMS uses an open compression format called AAC. But over that they have implemented a proprietary DRM system called FairPlay. Most of the others use Microsoft's Windows Media Audio.

The DRM plcaes several restrictions on the rights of the consumers. They can be overcome by first burning the tracks in to a music CD and then converting the tracks on the CD to an MP3 format. This will result in MP3 tracks of lesser quality and may also be illegal in the US. Just for this reason alone, eMusic is an attractive option. They let you download songs in unprotected MP3 format, that can be copied on to a CD and played in the Car CD player that can play MP3. The problem with protected Windows Media format is that even if the Car MP3 player can play WMA files, it will not be able to play protected WMA files that are downloaded from MSN Music or other services.

Software

For most of the download services, you would have to first download a music download management software from them, to be able to even browse their catalog. eMusic and MSN Music do not have this problem, you can search the catalog on their sites. With eMusic you can even buy and download songs without installing any of their software, though it is more convinient to use their software to manage the downloads. You may have to download Windows Media player Version 9 or above if you use a service which depends on Microsoft DRM.

Most of these applications can also play the downloaded songs, help you organize the music and act as your music jukebox. iTunes which is the jukebox of iTMS has won quite a following with its sleek look and implementation. MusicMatch makes one of the most popular jukeboxes.

       Duplicate Tracks - Pg 5               Trial Period - Pg 7