Before I start, I was wondering about something the other night. In the 1996 cult classic, Swingers, Jon Farveau's character is met with a dilemma. After receiving his first phone number after moving to L.A., he is met with a variety of advice on how long he should wait before calling the girl. Out of one his pal's arguments surfaces the "3 day rule". 12 years later, is there a 3 day rule on how long you should wait before sending a friends request on myspace after meeting someone new? Onto the subject at hand...

I  (unfortunately) just suspended my eMusic account for a few months. It's only to cut down on some costs in my personal budget. Otherwise, I am a big supporter of this service and I recommend it to all my friends and associates. I am entering my 5th year as a paying subscriber. That's about $500.00 of my personal money I used to buy legitimate independent music.

Although I have bought a few ala carte downloads, eMusic has made it really easy to download whole albums with confidence. The current entry level membership is $11.99/mo. for 30 downloads, which is about 39 cents a song (premium members can get songs as low as 25 cents each). So a ten track album will run you about 4 bucks, less than half of what iTunes sells albums for. In addition eMusic, like Amazon, offers mp3s that are compatible with any music player, while songs on iTunes only work with the iPod line of music players(which sucks if you ever wanted to experiment with the Zune).

Now, eMusic only offers a catalog from participating independent labels. There are a few larger indies whose physical catalog is distributed by major labels that have found their way onto the eMusic site (V2, Beggars Banquet, and...for a brief moment...ABCKO comes to mind). But you are not going to find your regular top 40 fare unless you are looking for older pre-major releases by Jay-Z and Coldplay.

So what did that $500.00 buy me? Well last night I decided to exclude the ala cartes and count all the full length albums and EPs that I have downloaded from eMusic the last four years. I came up with 124. That is 124 records that would have cost me about $1200-1500 if I bought them on CD. And for what it's worth, some of these recordings I liked so much I ended up buying them on vinyl anyway at my local indie retailer.  

I thought it would be a great idea to post cover images of all 124 albums to give everyone an idea of the broad range of cool independent rock music that you can purchase at a very reasonable price. It would be nice to see a widget available on eMusic's website that could just allow me to do this by entering a few lines of code (hint), but I just ended up uploading all the images to SLIDE.com and created a slideshow widget. I can't guarantee that all these albums are still available through eMusic since many labels have removed their titles over the past year or so.

Below the slideshow is a eMusic box for you to click in case you want to check out the service for yourself. The still have their infamous and no-risk "First 25 Downloads Free" promotion, so what do you have to lose?

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