Emusic is great, just started using emusic this month and ended up going for the premium subscription (90 tracks per month for €20.99). Like you say, I don't see it as a replacement for buying CDs, but it's great for legally downloading all that stuff you keep meaning to buy but never quite got round to, because its always lower down on your list of stuff you want to buy like sonic youths "SYR" instrumental albums or stuff that you might not take a chance on if you had to shell out the full price for a CD. Theres also stuff on there that's pretty hard to find, absolutely delighted to find Bergheim 34s album on there, which I'd been looking for for ages. Theres huge gaps in whats available though as it's mainly independent labels, which is kind of a shame. It'd be great to be able to download the occasional chart pop tune that catches your ear. I can still download it from iTunes if I want but at 99c a pop for a DRM locked file that won't play on some devices, I tend to avoid it like the plague. I've only ever downloaded one single from iTunes and thats simply because the only other way to purchase it was on vinyl. I'm not convinced the "free" spiralfrog is going to be sustainable, but it's an interesting development, I imagine there will be some limitation on how much you can download to balance out ad revenue versus royalties, still, if it allowed you to download chart stuff, a combination of spiralfrog + emusic account would probably mean you'd never need to touch itunes again. Microsoft will launch their own iPod rivalling player and service too called "Zune". Like most Microsoft stuff it will probably be crap at first (anyone remember Windows 1.0? Lan Manager? Windows CE) but Microsoft tend to have the resources and determination to plug away at something until it works (e.g Windows 1.0 became 3.11, then 9x then XP, Lan Manager became NT, became 2000, became server 2003, Windows CE became Pocket PC) Looking further into the future, the biggest threat to iTunes is possibly the fact that soon download services may not be really neccesary. Look at YouTube, a really simple, clever idea. Now they've promised to try and get every music video online. Imagine 5-10 years from now, everybody has a super, super fast broadband internet connection, even on their phone/mobile device. If you can stream anything you want straightaway, why do you need to download a local copy of anything? Thinking about it further, it raises some interesting questions about the future of creative control over a piece of music. In a world where content is kept online, rather than on local storage (disk, CD, iPod etc.) then the artist/publisher has the power to withdraw or revise something at will and that's pretty exciting yet scary concept.