Although eMusic is a great service—for a flat monthly fee, you get a set number of downloads per month of DRM-free music tracks—it’s about to get better. Or maybe worse, depending on the breadth of your musical tastes. Today eMusic will announce that Sony is adding its back catalog of songs to eMusic’s library. The bad news is that eMusic also plans to slightly raise prices and/or drop the number of downloads per month. Even if it works out to between 50-60 cents per track, though, that’s still far less than iTunes Music Store or Amazon, and probably the cheapest way to grab music from Sony artists without resorting to piracy.

Don’t blame Sony entirely for the price increase. In the New York Times article reporting the news, the CEO of eMusic basically admits that eMusic has been wanting to raise prices for a while (actually, he blames independent labels), and that this is a good time to do it.

Here’s what the new plans look like:

Plan Name	# of Downloads	Monthly Cost	Cost per track
Lite Basic Plus Premium Connoisseur	12 (every 30 days) 24 (every 30 days) 35 (every 30 days) 50 (every 30 days) 75 (every 30 days)	$6.49 $11.99 $15.89 $20.79 $30.99	$0.54 $0.50 $0.45 $0.42 $0.41

Note: I am not enough of an audiophile to make recommendations about sound quality of most “average” music files. For those of you who care about that sort of thing, eMusic encodes using variable bit rate at 192k.

“Sony Agrees to Provide Its Older Songs to eMusic” [New York Times]
(Photo: tipoyock)

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