Go, go, go, Audio Lunchbox! (And all other non-RIAA dues paying, major music label toting, DRM crack smoking music sites!)
Best discovery of 2006 so far for me has been
Audio Lunchbox, a DRM-free music store with an extensive library of great independent music. I learned of Audio Lunchbox through
a Podtech News podcast on the Independent Music Business Model (Podtech News is great, btw, if you haven't yet checked it out.) I spent some time exploring
eMusic.com, since it's a similar service with DRM-free music, but I felt too hustled to buy and it took me forever to find the eMusic browse page. I'm not an eMusic subscription person either. While a subscription model may make sense to eMusic by reducing the price of individual downloads for users in exchange for a fixed revenue model for eMusic, I don't want to be compelled to download my 40 tunes per month, or worry I'm going to max out for the 30-day cycle, or whatever. When eMusic drops the subscription I'll stop back by.
Audio Lunchbox, on the other hand, is a great site for me. No client software to download, a great library of offerings, no subscriptions, 99-cents per tune and $9.99 per album. And NO DRM! There's some weirdness about the site, mostly in the "Listeners Also Bought" block, but I quickly purchased a $50 Lunchbox card and with it purchased two
Nickel Creek albums and an album by a rock band called
Upside which I discovered while on Audio Lunchbox.
Now I'm going to have to start thinking how I link to Audio Lunchbox for album and details links instead of Amazon on my
iTunes Library page...
Technorati Tags: Audio Lunchbox, iTunes