Hurley's World

I am an iTunes and iPod guy. But when Wired mag waved 50 free downloads in my face via eMusic, I perked up. Never one to run from free music, and knowing that 5 eMusic. had a rep for being indie rock friendly, I took the bait and hit up the site. Well whattaya know. There it is in big bold characters: “50 FREE Downloads”. Hell, it even promises compatibility with the competition (iTunes). As Homer Simpson once said, “Extended warranty! How can I lose?”. It was go time. I punched in my credit card info and opened a new account, figuring if there were any shenanigans once I was inside, I would just cut and run. Once inside, I decided to test the waters with a single download from Spoon, picking up I Turn My Camera On. Once I had the song safely in my possession, I cruised over to the eMusic help docs to see where they stored the file on my hard drive, and then did the old import into iTunes. Success! No catch…so far. Now comfortable, I did some quick searches for items I have had on my wish-list for sometime now. I figured this would be a great time to pick up some things that I wanted to check out, but was not totally ready to spend the cash picking up via iTunes. I started with Wilco. No dice. Ok…not the end of the world, moving on. How about M83? I love Don’t Save Us From The Flames…oooh…no, nothing there either. Small setbacks though, as again…we are talking FREE music here, so going to the b-list is not going to make this mission a failure. It took some poking and searching, but I managed to find 50 tracks that I wanted to test drive and I ended up with:

• Sufjan Stevens - Come On Feel The Illinoise (22 Tracks)
• The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree (13 Tracks)
• The Decemberists - The Tain (1 Track*)
• Lady Sovereign - Random (1 Track)
• Tullycraft - Disenchanted Hearts Unite (12 Tracks)
• Spoon - I Turn My Camera On (1 Track)

*Possibly the best possible use of a single free download. The Tain is an 18 minute mini-album that is combined together to be one song. Not a bad take for 30 minutes of downloading. It was like supermarket sweep for Mp3’s. I felt like I was running down the aisles, with my arms out, pushing as much as I could into my cart in the allotted time. It worked out well. Well worth checking out the offer and if nothing else, pillaging the 50 freebies. freebies and then hitting the bricks. Also, upon initiating the cancellation process, they toss you a last minute “don’t leave us” offer of $5/month for a standard membership, rather than the normal $9.95…so if you want to stay, cancel anyways…or at least go through the first step to cancellation, and cut the price in half. Get your 50 freebies here.