The other day I pointed out Zunior.com, a toronto based digital music retailer. They have some reasonably popular stuff on their site like Bloc Party, the New Pornographers, and Final Fantasy. A large majority of the stuff is Canadian (not that that’s a bad thing). The site offers streaming samples of all the music on its site and only sells music as full albums (so no singles). What’s awesome is that the site sells DRM-free high-quality, 192kbps, MP3s for a mere $8.88CDN per album. And if you’re a huge music nerd you can even get the album in lossless FLAC format for $2 more.
So I took a peruse of the site and came across Jason Collett’s 2003 release Motor Motel Love Songs. I had recently been thinking that Collett really needs to hurry up a release a follow-up to his fantastic 2006 LP Idols of Exile (and if he can put out another song like Fire I’d be so grateful). So when I spotted Motor Motel, I gave the samples a quick listen, and said “why not?”. I created your standard web account and dropped my credit card number. Two seconds and $7.72USD later I was downloading a zip file containing 13 tracks and a PDF copy of the full CD artwork insert. The purchase lets you download the zip file for the next 14 days up to 1000 times. That means you’re responsible for backing up the music you download. None the less, I’m really impressed with the service and very happy with having more music by Jason Collett.
I’m game for this non-DRM music downloads goodness. The toss-up for me, though, is between eMusic and the Toronto store you’ve suggested…
emusic definitely has some positives to it but of both people I know who have it complain that after a while, you end up not downloading a full 30 songs every month and feel kinda ripped off.
luckily, thanks to this apple/emi deal, I’ve heard lots of rumors about other companies making in-roads to drm-free online sales.