Download eMusic Tracks on Your AT&T Phone

Great news today for one of my favorite music sites: eMusic, the online music service that's always been DRM-free, will now be available through AT&T phones. The new eMusic mobile service works with Nokia's N75 and Samsung's a717, a727, and Sync phones.

So far, download-to-mobile music services have frankly been pretty crappy, so it's nice to see a provider like eMusic jump into the fray. Still, there are a couple weird things about this offering. The price, for one: $7.49 a month for five songs?! You do at least get to download the music to both your phone and your PC, but a normal, PC-based eMusic subscription starts at $9.99 a month for 30 songs. What's with the giant markup?

And why no iPhone access? (Well, I'll tell you why no iPhone access... there's this company called Apple, you see, and they happen to run a pretty large digital music store, and... well, you get the idea.)

eMusic's subscription service is tantalizingly web-based--you can view their entire collection in your web browser without subscribing. But downloading songs requires a download manager app, so you iPhone users won't simply be able to grab tracks using their existing eMusic subscription. That's a real shame, too, since eMusic already has an OSX version of its download manager. If only you could install third party apps on the iPhone.

Anyway, great get for eMusic, but their PC-based service remains a much better value. If you can bring yourself to download tracks at home and sync them to your phone, you'll save a bundle.

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