Technology Liberation Front has a good article up about how eMusic might represent “The Future of Music.” I found this article via Kareem’s blog, and normally it would just be a headline link here, as it was on reemer.com.

It’s not a headline post because, coincidently, Atrios has been plugging eMusic for a few days and I went ahead and gave it a try because of the 50 free MP3 trial offer. So far, I’ve found some cool Indian-influenced music that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. On the whole, though, I’ve found the whole thing quite daunting. It’s a very big catalog of less-than-well-known music and, because of that, it’s very, very hard to navigate it all. I use the same approach as I do with iTunes, relying on top sales lists, but previewing clips is too complicated on the Mac.

That’s probably the biggest problem I have. The site offers .m3u files (MP3 playlists) for previews. It’s all nicely standards based, but the default behavior on the Mac is to play the .m3u file in iTunes. That means that I have a clutter of random streaming MP3 clips stuck in iTunes that I don’t really want. I tried switching to just using Quicktime for .m3u files, but then it downloads the file to my disk, where I have to double-click it (or the icon in he download center) to play the file. In the end, I stayed with this system, previewing entire albums so I would only have to do it once per album.

I’m open to any suggestions people have with using eMusic on the Mac.

The article is a good read, by the way. You should check it out.