A while back scunner pointed me to Emusic, an online site where, for a monthly fee, you can download as much music as your bandwidth can cope with. It’s all legal and above board: the artists get royalties per download, and all in all it seems like a fine model for how music can be distributed.

Obviously not every artist on the planet is going to be on there, so it can be kind of disappointing sometimes. However, the kind of artist that is there (in my brief study of the matter) is kind of off the wall, left field stuff that maybe doesn’t get major mainstream distribution. The sort of stuff I tend to like, in other words.

Furthermore, I have no problems using Mozilla at their site, and their download manager is available for Linux as well as Windows. They just get it, I thought.

So I just started a trial subscription period: fourteen days, fifty files. Plenty to choose from, and it’s all going very well.

Or it was, until I started seeing this message appear alongside some albums: Not available outside North America due to licensing restrictions.

And this is alongside, for example, everything they have by The Birthday Party. Bugger. Bastards.

I’m expecting comments from scunner and swisstone about this, because they specifically said that Lazy Line Painter Jane by Belle And Sebastian was on Emusic; and it is: a Scottish band, not licensed outside of North America.

So does anyone know how to get round this? I could change my registered country to the US, but it would cause some problems as my credit card billing address, I fancy.

Though its not like they’re sending anything…