The company, which Vivendi Universal bought last year, has cut a host of bundling deals, including a pioneering agreement in 2000 that packaged two months of free, unlimited downloads from its site along with Hewlett-Packard's CD-Writer recordable drives. That arrangement, which lasted only three months, was followed by a string of others, including a second HP deal as well as pacts with Iomega, Sonicblue and Gateway.

So much for synergies. In two years, EMusic has signed up just 50,000 paid users for its menu of some 100,000 independent label tracks, according to the company, a trivial number compared with the ranks of Web surfers drawn to the free file-swapping services it competes against. LimeWire, one of the most prominent versions of Gnutella-based software, reported that in one day, it reached 300,000 people.

EMusic General Manager Steve Grady admitted some of the deals didn't work, but he defended them in general as useful experiments and, in some cases, as a cost-effective alternative to mass marketing. When EMusic was an independent company with a small marketing budget, he said, it didn't have the money to conduct tests for its service. The collaborative deals, according to Grady, enabled it to know that every dollar it spent was going toward a subscriber coming into the service.

Grady admits that some partnerships didn't meet the company's expectations. A partner might have a million customers, but if it doesn't deliver them in a way that is "compelling or visible," it doesn't help sell the service.