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Dotmusic on Demand
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Overall

Reviewed By: Andrew Craig

This review updated: 21/10/2003
Featured in magazine:
Issue 54, page 39
Manufacturer Contacts:
Web Address: www.dotmusic.com/ondemand


Price:
£9.99/month (inc VAT) for unlimited streaming, downloading and 10 burns
£4.99/month for 500 streams and 50 downloads
£0.99-£1.49 for individual tracks

Dotmusic on demand is a legal music download service formerly from BT, but now owned by Yahoo. It's a subscription service and one of the first legitimate alternatives to the hordes of illegal file-sharing services. It uses the same back-end system as the music services from Freeserve, MSN and Tiscali, but unlike these it offers unlimited streaming and downloading. Music genres include rock, folk, classical and hip hop. Tracks are available from all major labels except Sony.

To start off you can search for specific tracks or albums, listen to genre-specific radio stations or listen to a playlist selected by you or other subscribers. The search provides no more information about a CD than its track listing. Once you've located the music you want to hear you can stream it, download a copy that you can listen to on your computer until your subscription expires, or burn a permanent copy to CD. To help you choose, there are lists of the most popular downloads and playlists.

Our main concern was that many popular artists such as The Beatles, Oasis and Nirvana weren't listed. We also noticed that tracks by some listed artists cannot be burned. Being able to stream an album with one click was useful, although the 32K audio streams were poor quality and there was an extended gap between tracks. Downloaded tracks were of higher quality, but limited to the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format which won't please MP3 fans.

We found it easy to get started and were impressed by the variety of options such as playlists and radio. However, we felt you really needed to know what you were looking for to get the most from it. We would have liked the site to offer more suggested listening and reviews from other subscribers. The search engine was fast, but results didn't distinguish between albums and singles, and didn't give release dates for the records anywhere on the site.

For unlimited downloads and streaming, plus 10 tracks to burn, you'll pay £9.99 a month. This gives you access to around 150,000 tracks and will give you an impressive digital music collection in no time. It could also save you money by letting you listen to albums before you buy them. But playback is quite restricted because you can't play the downloads on another computer or portable music player. Broadband users will be frustrated by the low quality audio streams, although there are plans to improve this.

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