I have now downloaded all my 25 free tracks, which amounts to just over 128 minutes of music, with a fair range of different styles.

The haul includes:

• 3 tracks from an acoustic Toyah album
• Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus
• 3 tracks from the Easy Star All-Stars (2 Radiohead and a Pink Floyd song all in reggae style)
• 2 tracks from Rachid Taha's Made in medina album
• 3 tracks by Nouvelle Vague
• Pump Up The Volume by M/A/R/R/S
• 3 tracks by Neu!
• 2 tracks by the Black Angels
• Tracks by the Rollins Band, Chicks on Speed, Peaches, Veruca Salt, Buzzcocks, Sparks, Eagles of Death Metal and the White Stripes

Its been fun hearing some new sounds. There are bands I have heard of but never actually heard like Neu! which turned out to be great. I have until next Friday (my birthday!) to decide whether to pay to continue. I think I could already find enough tracks from Neu!, Rollins Band, White Stripes, Dead Kennedys and the Fall to make it worth staying for another month or two and have not much trouble finding 40 tracks a month, but beyond that I'm not so sure.

As I already observed, there is not a lot of current mainstream/popular music apart from all the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand albums I already have but I did just find all the White Stripes albums and singles.

When a band has had two or more record labels during their career, its sod's law that the label they had all their hits on is not part of eMusic. This means that bands like Jethro Tull, Judas Priest, the Kinks, Buzzcocks, Sparks and Motorhead but you won't find the big hits – only albums made in the last few years. In some cases you get the stuff they made before they got picked up by a big label and had lots of money spent on producers and studio time. This can be interesting, though the Elton John album of cover versions he did for the infamous Top Of The Pops series is for novelty value only.

Other artists (for example Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Depeche Mode) are not there, but have a range of 'tribute albums' so you can get their songs but only sung by other artists. Sometimes that can be fun, but you have to sort through a lot of dross to get the nuggets.  It turns out that 10 of the tracks I downloaded are cover versions – if you count the acoustic Toyah ones as covers.

I'm still undecided. Having discovered that I like the Eagles of Death Metal, Black Angels and Peaches I might hang around for a month to get more of their tracks, plus the best bits of Tubeway Army's first album and some more Rollins Band – but after a month or two I think I would have to bale out unless more artists and labels got involved, or unless I develop a Fall habit (18 albums and 13 live performances available!) which is a pity – I do like the idea of a legal site which does not impose DRM on all its tracks.