MP3 quality from Beatport / Amazon / Juno

I’ve purchased from Amazon, emusic, CDBaby, Bandcamp and several label’s own download shops so far. Almost all shops except Bandcamp (where you are allowed to choose your preferred format) have settled for lame encoded mp3s with the highest vbr setting (–V0) which results in a typical average bitrate between 200-300 kbps. Should be transparent even for the most sensitive listeners.
I’ve heard some horror stories about older releases on emusic being transcoded from lossy files though. Don’t know if they have fixed that issue by now.

My eMusic purchases have been VBR for the most part, but I’m avoiding them for other reasons. When I was without a job I cut all my frivolous expenses including my eMusic subscription. I chose the “freeze for 3 months” option which stopped recurring payments. After the 3 months expired, it automatically reactivated, but I could not access my account options! It kept redirecting me to a “choose your plan” page which then looped back to saying “it seems that you already have an account with us.”

When I logged in I always had a balance of zero dollars yet the monthly fees came back after the 3 months of temporary closure. So the eMusic service sees my account like some “phantom user” with missing credentials while still being charged for it. Time to call their customer support, and be through with them.

Kent Sandvik, post: 30555, member: 3967 wrote: eMusic used to be so fun (I still am annoyed as I missed the first six months when you could download all the Frank Zappa albums with unlimited downloads per month (!!)), the first two years were fun but it’s gone downhill and I bailed eMusic four years ago == 192kpbs VBR and the cost of MP3s were close to Amazon/iTunes plus less material. And many indie labels as well bailed out from the eMusic catalog. RIP eMusic.

Yup, when the major label catalogues found their way into emusic, something must have happened to really piss off some of the bigger indies (Sub Pop, Domino and 4AD among others), so they chose to quit. I can only guess, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the majors neogitated better conditions on the indies’ expense.
I’m still subscribed to emusic’s minimum plan because, although it’s not the bargain offer it once was, there still is always something i can get cheaper there than on other services. And i’m always broke.
I just wish everybody would sell their stuff on bandcamp, since it not only tends to be cheap (and lossless if you want), but also has much better conditions for independent artists than iTunes etc. Check out this link. It might already be a bit outdated, but it was a real eye-opener for me. I really don’t see why itunes should keep about 50% of the earnings, just for offering a download and collecting money. Selling digital files cannot be that expensive. Less than 20% would seem reasonable to me. Everything else is ripping off the artists.