Despite Sony Music Australia being on my Enemies List for wrecking eMusic, I've been trying out their download service bandit.fm. Only because they offer special promos each month that make it a good deal. Before I went to America they had a "buy your first album, get $20" deal so I exploited that with a couple of accounts.

Got some nice stuff, the Blind Faith record, some Ray Charles, a Flying Burrito Brothers set and cherry picked the new K'Naan (Somali-Canadian rapper) which is very good and a few other singles. In August they are having "buy an album and get $20 credit." So I bought Marianne Faithfull's Broken English for $10. With that, I got a Nine Simone box set which is thirty some dollars but the $20 made a nice discount.

Without these deals however and all other things being equal, I would stick to iTunes for the occasional purchases I normally make this way. The bandit.fm site is pretty and shiny but sometimes a pain to use. iTunes is not without its annoyances but at least the info is presented in a no frills style that makes scanning and picking easier. The artist pages at bandit.fm have too many giant graphics and too little easily accessiable information. You can click one extra time and get to a list of albums available, but that stuff should be right up front. There are also some technical issues. When you click on an album, a box pops up to listen to it and the rest of the screeen whites out until you close the box. Fine, except I sometimes get the whited out screen with no box and can't get out of it without shutting the tab and reopening the site entirely. The downloads are at 320kpb so audiophiles may applaud the quality but it also makes your average album a huge size in MBs. If you only have, say, a 1 or 2GB MP3 player who wants one album to take up 500MB. Don't need it, and would like a choice of formats.

So in short, the price is almost always the same as iTunes and there is no other reason to use it over iTunes - except for the special discounts each month, which is presumably why they offer them.