Why EMusic is better than Apple

Apple's new music service has had a good press, which is in keeping with the massive support given to almost anything Apple does. (Hard to see anyone else getting away with such a high-priced service based on its own software and iPod-style player without stimulating some sort of outcry. Instead you get sneering, as The New York Times does, at those "occasional oddballs whose music players are not iPods".) Of course, it's hard to find anyone who thinks the current music subscription services are adequate, but as this page points out, 99c a song is not a good deal compared to a flat $10 a month for EMusic, unless you download less than 10 songs a month -- and a lot of broadband users download 10 an hour. Still, not everyone inhabits Steve Jobs's famous reality distortion field: in The Register, Andrew Orlowski claims that: "Judging from my inbox, happy users are outnumbered by unhappy users by about ten to one."