I’ve already talked about them repeatedly, but there’s an article about eMusic I read the other day that I thought was pretty interesting. It confirmed some things that I already knew, like the fact that I’m pretty much the exact definition of their target market (the over 25 music fan that likes to check out new stuff on a whim and wouldn’t even consider buying music with DRM). However, there were some things I was suprised to learn, like that they’re the number 2 retailer of downloadable music behind, obviously, iTunes. That’s good news for me that they’re doing well, because honestly I don’t know what I’d do without my monthly downloads. I’ve got almost 300 albums left to get!

One thing I’ve been hoping for quite some time that eMusic would add is RSS feeds of their most recently added music. I’ve just learned from their forums though that they’ve already had that feature for a little while now, they’ve just done a good job of hiding it for some reason. However, it’s pretty cool because you can get an RSS feed for pretty much any category you want, no matter how broad or specific. Basically all you have to do is navigate to a page that contains the set of results you want to get updated on, for example New This Month->Alternative/Punk->Indie Pop->Freshly Ripped and then just replace the word “browse” in the URL with “rss”. So

http://www.emusic.com/browse/n/b/n/a/0-0/65+1200000301+⁶⁸⁄₀.html

would become

http://www.emusic.com/rss/n/b/n/a/0-0/65+1200000301+⁶⁸⁄₀.html

Plug that URL into your preferred feed reader and that’s all it takes to get updates via RSS about the newest music available in your genre(s) of choice. It’s pretty handy, so hopefully they’ll make it a little more accessible in the future.