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Audio Lunchbox Review
- Audio Lunchbox offers a subscription service which gives you a set number of song credits per month or a pay as you go service where you pay per download
- The subscription service offers the following plans:
- Gold - 40 credits per month - $9.99
- Diamond - 125 credits per month - $24.99
- 1 Year Pre-Paid Gold - 30 credits per month + 120 anytime
- 1 Year Pre-Paid Diamond - 80 credits per month + 250 anytime
- Songs can be downloaded for 1 credit, albums for 10 credits
- The pay as you go service costs the folloing per download:
- Individual Songs - $0.99
- Albums - $9.99
- All downloads are DRM free
- Over 2 million songs in the music library
- 50 free downloads just for signing up
- Copy to an unlimited number of portable players
- Burn to an unlimited number of CDs
- Focus on independent music
- Discover music by new, upcoming artists
- All downloads in MP3 format encoded at 192 kbps
- Cancel subscription any time - no ties
- Wishlist feature to keep track of music you want to buy
- Download cover art with albums
- Free previews of all music
- User reviews allow you to see what other people thought about songs
- "Other Users Bought" feature to let you see what other people who like the same music bought
- Subscription service or pay per download - it's up to you
- Supports any computer with a web browser
- 24 hour time frame to try broken downloads again
Audio Lunchbox is a music download service for independent music lovers. It offers a good variety of payment plans and competitive prices, but a couple of slight annoyances in the web site mean that it comes in towards the bottom of our top ten list of music download services. Read on to find out what we thought.
The first thing we should point out is that Audio Lunchbox is only for people interested in indie music and discovering new artists. If you are looking for the latest Pussycat Dolls album stop reading now. That said, you will still find artists you have heard of on the site - from Frank Sinatra through to Queens of the Stone Age. With over 2 million tracks there's a good chance you will find what you are after, but we would recommend searching the library before committing to a subscription.
The Audio Lunchbox website is designed fairly well. It is easy to navigate, with all the usual options such as browse by genre or search by artist, but isn't quite as polished as some of the sites in this category. The single most annoying feature of the web site is the amount of advertising constantly thrown in your face. Not even just for other music products as you might expect; we were bombarded with a cartoon woman performing a strip tease to advertise novelty greetings cards. This might be acceptable if it was kept to a small area of the screen somewhere, but every so often when you click a link you are presented with a full screen add which stays on screen for 15 seconds before forwarding you to the link you clicked. Admittedly, there is a 'skip' button, but we would really prefer not to have advertising forced on us this way in the first place - especially from a site that we may be paying a subscription fee to.
The other thing that disappointed us with the web site was the lack of artist or album information. It seems that none of the artists or albums have any information provided on them except release date and record label. This is a pretty poor show from a service mainly offering music by artists you won't know much about. It makes discovering new artists and music a bit more difficult when you have to look them up elsewhere. The one saving grace is that there is an Amazon-style feature showing what was bought by other users who like the same music as you. This often shows up some handy suggestions for new music to download.
Regarding Digital Rights Management (DRM):
all the music you download from Audio Lunchbox is in DRM free MP3 format. This means you are free to copy it to any portable player or burn to an unlimited number of CDs - within the terms of the copyright agreement. The tracks are all encoded at 192 kbps which is good enough quality, but some of the bigger sites are starting to offer 256 kpbs.
What about value for money? Well,
Audio Lunchbox offers a subscription service or a pay as you download service. The subscription service gives you a set amount of credits to spend each month for a set price each month and generally works out slightly cheaper than the pay as you go option. Individual songs can usually be downloaded for 1 credit and albums for 10 credits. On pay as you go they cost $0.99 and $9.99 respectively. To save you the effort we've worked out here what a track costs on each subscription plan:
- Gold provides 40 credits per month for $9.99. That means songs work out at about $0.25 each.
- Diamond provides 125 credits per month for $24.99, so songs work out at about $0.20 each.
You can pay for a whole year's subscription at once which gives you 10 less credits each month, but frees them up to be used at any time. For example gold gives you 30 credits per month and 120 to use at any time, which in total is the same 480 you would get paying monthly.
Audio Lunchbox is a decent service for anyone into independent music. The subscription plans mean you can get songs for as little as $0.20, but with no artist information provided on the web site you'll have to already know what you want to download. If you love independent music and can put up with the constant advertising you'll get on well with Audio Lunchbox. Anyone else can probably find a better service elsewhere.
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