I've always wondered why online music people were so clueless. It's like they all smell money and nobody can agree on who gets the biggest share, so nothing gets done. All people want is a decent selection, at a decent price, without artificial obstacles in between them and their purchase.

The Apple Music Store is fine. Unless you don't have an Apple. Or unless you want to move your encumbered music files to a different format or player or computer or operating system or whatever.

Buy.com (I never know how to capitalize a URL that starts a sentence) recently launched their service. They sell by the song (and therefore album) like Apple, which is also fine. As long as you own a computer than runs Windows so that you can use what you purchase.

I like neither of the above because none of the music I would purchase will play on the hardware I want to play it on. And the "Suck it up and get a Mac/Windows box" argument is misguided. I have over 40 GB of MP3s that I've taken great pains to rip, tag, and store in a very orderly fashion. I don't want to have some music which can play on my stereo (or in my car) and some that won't, just because a bunch of lawyers smelled cash and decided a hampered format was best. I want music that matches everything else I've been using for the last 5 years. If I buy music, I want to be able to use where I want to use it.

I just found what I was looking for: emusic.com.

They let you buy music on the subscription model. You pay $9.99 a month, and you can download as many honest-to-friggen-god MP3 files as you want. And they have 200,000 files to choose from. And -- get this -- they even support Linux! And Mac! And Windows! Will wonders never cease? I thought I was hallucinating when I saw that.

The music they have is... "not necessarily mainstream". Which is exactly what I've been looking for. I mean, I could give a shit about Britney or Beyonce or some hip-hop crap. The flip side is that it's hard to know what a song sounds like without listening to it. That's not a problem because they let you hear 30 second samples of any song on any album, so you can quickly listen to a new band and figure out if the (free) download is worth it. It's a great way to find new bands. In that last two hours, I've picked up 12 CDs worth of music, 4 of which I have been meaning to buy for a long time now (Cramps, Frank Black, Django Reinhardt, etc.). The rest I'd never even heard of until I listened to some 30 second samples (I'm fairly fond of The Future Sound Of London). So far, my favorite new artist is Yo La Tengo.

Anyway, I couldn't even find most of the stuff I've gotten in music stores (they even have El Vez for cryin' out loud), and the stuff I did get would have cost over $60 in physical media (which I would have instantly ripped and then shelved; I don't care about liner notes or lyrics or whatever). I've paid for 6 months of my yearly subscription already, and I haven't even gotten to their jazz or blues collections yet.

The coolest part is that you get whole albums, and they sometimes have reviews which helps. I've always kept my music collection napster-free. Everything I have I've bought and ripped. It's not so much out of altruism as pickiness: I like having an entire album of a known quality, and hearing the songs in succession (although I play all songs on random a lot). I think music should be listened to the way the artist intended it. Would you throw tracks from Dark Side of the Moon randomly into a directory? Sgt. Peppers? Miles Davis? Hell no! Each one represents a collection of music, like a snpshot in time, and it's supposed to remain whole. Besides, people who just get whatever songs they like and dump them into unordered directories are basically after personal radio. I'm after digitally archiving my music library.

Anyway, emusic.com has a free trial where you can download 50 files free, whether they'r from one album or 50. It's worth a look. I've purchased hundreds of songs for $9.99 so far tonight. That's a screaming deal, in my book.