eMusic, the indie song downloading service, recently celebrated reaching the 250 million song download milestone.br style=clear: both;/ a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:dc2cde8de1e49fe1eda88f985d78ae22:grnxOCDlf2t4qV9ZuGgg1I%2BxiV6arKValxYSsVc2Aa8YpFkM%2F7YG8J2lOMg%2FRS9wAEj%2FaBkHa%2FU0'img border='0' title='Add to digg' alt='Add to digg' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/digg.gif'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:540609f5d1f474cf7ab92aadd436d679:wBKvQXewrIwGzeywPOQrKfW3vsDoB7JXEfrjxejKQxDaL4qf46ZL7yWmfei3x%2B%2FaOEFcTDaM9fKq'img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:5e7e7e359897bec617b38bb402ac9b42:MhMkAoDXCU0G%2FVb6KyyzDt3ehMoHqfsgYt4qSTMDLa%2F%2F6TzAoF0BIJNj2I9b%2FWEXhPDgR1e%2BDJxeAg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to Slashdot' alt='Add to Slashdot' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/slashdot.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:8d72701599eecf344f1a6176533c0b4e:1EWqaDcAsWNvYl6vy3OmIqTt1C0ff4JnIZEU%2BqlBm2xU5J5CgDzDgv2w9kOTGn36psR2vRpHCFuo'img border='0' title='Email this Article' alt='Email this Article' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/emailthis.png'//a a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.php?hfmm=v3:3621a8f64b29a603385dfb6913c2dc80:qeSLXLjZv7DK4IvGiWt8KmLhePtP%2F6jFD18zYgDZQfxn1uptKSpPlLw1MoPF160dO5wIH1zQj%2Bkuyg%3D%3D'img border='0' title='Add to StumbleUpon' alt='Add to StumbleUpon' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/stumbleit.gif'//a br style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=dab04ecee40c4ff820a38ba8cd28b59dp=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=dab04ecee40c4ff820a38ba8cd28b59dp=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=dab04ecee40c4ff820a38ba8cd28b59d style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

via MacNN:

Veteran online music store eMusic today said it has registered its 250 millionth download since its subscription service began in 2003. The company is one of the few outside of Apple to reach the milestone and is owed partly to eMusic's business model, which offers unprotected MP3s compatible with Apple and Microsoft players but uses a subscription model which guarantees a certain number of songs...


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Veteran online music store eMusic today said it has registered its 250 millionth download since its subscription service began in 2003. The company is one of the few outside of Apple to reach the milestone and is owed partly to eMusic's business model, which offers unprotected MP3s compatible with Apple and Microsoft players but uses a subscription model which guarantees a certain number of songs...

Indie digital retailer eMusic announced they have added the labels Righteous Babe, Barsuk, and Domino to their catalogue, bringing the total number of tracks available on the site to 4.5 million.

Indie digital retailer eMusic announced they have added the labels Righteous Babe, Barsuk, and Domino to their catalogue, bringing the total number of tracks available on the site to 4.5 million.

Indie digital retailer eMusic announced they have added the labels Righteous Babe, Barsuk, and Domino to their catalogue, bringing the total number of tracks available on the site to 4.5 million.

Microsoft has upgraded their Zune Pass music subscription service to include 10 free full song downloads per month, which users get to keep regardless of their continuing participation with the subscription.img src=http://dw.com.com/clear/c.gif?ts=1115768950edId=3prtnr=CNET%20Networks,%20Inc.oid=2100-null-ptId=2547onId=nullsId=17asId=astId=1CTYPE=rss_feedsCVAL= border=0 height=1 width=1 alt= /

Will the music subscription business ever grow beyond its current niche? It looks increasingly doubtful. Today, eMusic announced that since it launched its current music subscription service in 2003, customers have downloaded 250 million songs. Apple’s iTunes, by comparison, has sold more than 5 billion songs since it opened the iTunes Store in April, 2003. That makes eMusic one twentieth the size of iTunes.

The way eMusic works is you pay a subscription of between $12 and $20 a month and then you can download 30 to 75 songs a month and keep them. You can also purchase songs above those limits, starting at $0.25 a track. eMusic has a catalog of 4.5 million songs, and is particularly strong in independent music. It currently has 400,000 subscribers, and the company expects to make $70 million in revenues this year.

That implies the vast majority of subscribers opt in for the basic $12 a month plan, which would net $57.6 million a year if that is what everyone paid. The difference can be accounted for by those people who opt for the more expensive land and additional downloads. And the best part of the business is that eMusic only pays the labels for the songs its customers download. So if someone doesn’t use up their allotment and only downloads 5 songs during a given month, eMusic pockets the money that would have gone to the labels for the other 25 songs they could have downloaded.

It’s a nice business because eMusic gets rewarded for customer laziness. And iTunes certainly needs competition, so I hope it keeps chugging along. But these numbers don’t bode well for the subscription music business ever rising up to challenge iTunes in any meaningful way.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Seagate kicked out a couple of FreeAgent Go hard drives a few months back, but it's now gone all out and let loose an even more colorful batch in the hope of attracting a bit more attention among holiday shoppers -- as usual, Festivus revelers luck out year 'round with the ever-present, aluminum pole-matching silver option. From the looks of it, the drives are still available in the same 250GB, 320GB, and 500GB capacitiies as before for $120, $150, and $200, respectively, and those that register their drives between November 28th and New Year's day will get a bonus multimedia package including 50 free songs from eMusic and some other goodies. You can also pick up a desktop docking station separately for $30, just don't expect to get it in matching colors.

[Via Electronista]

Filed under: Storage

Seagate expands FreeAgent Go line with yet more color options originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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div align="center"a href="http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/portable-hard-drive/Free-Agent.html"img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="0" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/11/seagate-freeagent-go-11-19-08.jpg" alt="" //abr / div align="left"Seagate kicked out a couple of FreeAgent Go hard drives aa href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/15/seagates-freeagent-drives-get-official-go-desk-extreme/" few months back/a, but it's now gone all out and let loose an even more colorful batch in the hope of attracting a bit more attention among holiday shoppers -- as usual, Festivus revelers luck out year 'round with the ever-present, aluminum pole-matching silver option. From the looks of it, the drives are still available in the same 250GB, 320GB, and 500GB capacitiies as before for $120, $150, and $200, respectively, and those that register their drives between November 28th and New Year's day will get a bonus multimedia package including 50 free songs from eMusic and some other goodies. You can also pick up a desktop docking station separately for $30, just don't expect to get it in matching colors.br /br /[Via a href="http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/11/19/seagate.adds.colors.to.go/"Electronista/a]/div /divpFiled under: a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/storage/" rel="tag"Storage/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/seagate-expands-freeagent-go-line-with-yet-more-color-options/"Seagate expands FreeAgent Go line with yet more color options/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.engadget.com"Engadget/a on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:46:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/portable-hard-drive/Free-Agent.htmlRead/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/seagate-expands-freeagent-go-line-with-yet-more-color-options/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/forward/1377336/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/seagate-expands-freeagent-go-line-with-yet-more-color-options/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/4BfFxmjwcctUm_KSfULVTPf2J5U/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/4BfFxmjwcctUm_KSfULVTPf2J5U/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=JYK6VsIz"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=JYK6VsIz" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=FzWwVLej"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=FzWwVLej" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~4/2kKua8eWn7g" height="1" width="1"/

Independent online retailer eMusic has now sold 250 million downloads, according to figures shared Wednesday.  The company star...