Indie music reseller eMusic claims 100 million sold

by Peter Cohen, Playlist Magazine

Online independent music reseller eMusic announced Wednesday that they’ve sold 100 million downloads. The company has been selling music online for about three years, and announced it had sold 50 million songs about 11 months ago.

Last month eMusic announced they were nearing the 100 million mark.

That may be a drop in the bucket compared to Apple’s iTunes Store’s totals — more than 1.5 billion songs sold, at last count, this past September — but it’s good enough to put eMusic in second place behind iTunes, according to the company. eMusic boasts a catalog of more than 2 million tracks, doubling its amount of music available in 2006.

eMusic sells music from 9,800 independent music labels. The company sells tracks encoded using MP3. Unlike songs downloaded from the iTunes Store and other major commercial services, eMusic’s MP3 files aren’t encumbered with any kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions.