If you read my post the other day about Barenaked Ladies and how they’re essentially trying to get as much money out of their fans as possible, you’ll recall I wrote that the objective was to get 29 tracks, plus the live tracks.  The other goal was to not spend too much money, and to hopefully get the tracks in good sonic quality – which is why I hesitated on the USB stick.  Plus, reading the boards at barenaked.net, plenty of people were complaining about not receiving their orders from Nettwerk in Canada.

So I have a solution now.  It’s not absolutely perfect, but it’s close.  You can get 27 tracks, plus all the live stuff, in 192k variable bit rate quality, for ten bucks.

Here’s how you do it.

Sign up for eMusic.com.  Use the link provided here; it’s a referral link from our good friend Jefito, a loyal eMusic subscriber, and he’ll get a few free tracks in return.  This is a no-brainer; think of all the music Jefito has given to you.

Signing up for eMusic.com gets you 25 free tracks.  eMusic offers the Deluxe Edition of Barenaked Ladies Are Me.  It’s not 29 tracks.  It’s 27.  That’s the trade-off here.  Stay with me.

So you can get almost all of your 27 tracks with that free trial.  After that, you’ll be asked to choose a monthly subscription plan.  You can choose the $9.99/month plan, which offers you 40 downloads per month.  That’ll help you get the remaining two tracks.  You’ll also be able to get the just-released All New Revue – Live at the Glenn Gould Studio – which, as far as I know, contains all the live tracks I was bitching about previously.

Once you’ve done all of that, you can either keep your eMusic subscription – if you like what you see on their site, that is – or you can cancel.  No obligation.  You can cancel anytime, according to their FAQ.

So that’s the story.  27 tracks, plus the live stuff, 192k VBR, $9.99.  It’s not uncompressed, but it’s close.  It’s not everything, but it’s close.  And you can’t beat the price.  Plus, eMusic seems like a really cool company.  (Mike and I actually signed up with them years ago during the dot-com boom and wound up with free headphones, two unbelievable Logitech music speakers and a subwoofer.)

And I’ll make you another deal.  If I somehow wind up with those two bonus tracks ("What A Let-Down"/"Why Say Anything Nice")…since they’re not available for purchase, I’ll offer them for download.

Get thee to eMusic.com!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 4:59 pm and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.