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EMusic Acquired, Halting Unlimited Downloads
wallabywatson writes "EMusic.com have announced that they are cancelling their $9.99 a month unlimited download service after being acquired by Dimensional Associates LLC. Instead, subscribers will be limited to 40 downloads (ie 3ish albums) per month. A new premium $50 a month service will allow 300 tracks (~25 albums). The service details have been released as have new terms and conditions. If, like me, you think this sucks and want to cancel your subscription go here before November 8, 2003."
The link provided is to UPGRADE your account, not delete it. Someone get a real deletion link.
The simple fact is, they will never be able to stop it unless they stop selling the product. Surrender, sometimes that's your only option.
"When I look back, my life is not a foreign country, it's more like a library book returned long ago." - ????
It sucked anyway, since it means you could go for months where there was no good music to get and still pay $9.99.
Now, if they changed it to a 50 cent per song charge, no extras payments, that would be killer.
By the way - When will /. offer a subscription with an unlimited number of pages?
I have been an eMusic subscriber for almost a year now. Going to download some Bill Evans and cancel my acct this month. Sad thing is that I probably average 3 albums a month but I go some months w/o downloading at all. Oh, well...
The "go here" URL takes you to the upgrade account page.
Just login to EMusic and stop your subscription if you want to cancel. I just did.
Darnit, no more all I can download cheesy sound effects MP3's...
Mind the gap...
This really does suck. If they could not afford to keep up the unlimited downloads, they should not have offered them from the start. I already canceled. It really kind of hurts to be honest. E-music was a example of how indie labels could work with selling music online via mp3. Now that is ruined.
I can't believe that anyone subscribing now won't cancel. I really have to wonder where they came up with this pricing plan. Oh well. Let's hope another good place like emusic comes around. Sad.
I for one despise our new overpriced music overlords.
I wonder if their catalog will be changing/expanding.
If not...bye bye emusic. It was nice knowing ya.
I got their email. Ten minutes later I cancled my account.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
It's not nearly as good as it used to be, but it's not bad. It's way cheaper than buying music in the store. Everyone is always saying that if CD's were $5 that they'd buy them all the time; well, here they are less than $5 so what's the problem?
Aw crap, ninjas!
40 downloads? That's a joke right? The main reason I even subscribed in the first place is so I could just browse around and FIND music I liked. And no, Kazaa dos not make music (ie music you've never heard) easy to find, it only finds things that you already want. At a mere 40 I doubt I'll find much of anything. Hell by the time I did find an artist I liked I'd probably be at my cap anyway. It's really sad considering how much I've been preaching about emusic.com and now it's been completely fucked up.
They're eliminating the one advantage they had over other music services - and the big advantage they had over meatspace music stores - the ability to sample as much as you want without worrying about running into any "limit".
Sorry, Emusic, I'll be downloading the rest of the albums I've selected and put in "my stash", and then canceling.
Earl in St. Louis
When it'd cost ~375 to go to a store and buy 25 albums, this is still a decent deal for those that have morals, although I think there other online services with better rates.
I know nothing
For people who download a lot of music, EMusic might have been a good deal before (not so much now). But for those of us who buy less than 10 songs a month, Apple's iTunes Music Store (ITMS) is a much better deal.
The rumors suggest that it will be out on Windows before the end of October. I'll play with it on my Windows box, but I'll still do all my purchasing on my Macs.
- Vincit qui patitur.
For those who don't want to RTFA, there's actually two plans, plus a third for subscribers who signed up before 10-8-2003:
EMusic Basic: $9.99 per month/maximum 40 downloads
EMusic Plus: $14.99 per month/maximum 65 downloads
EMusic Premium: $50.00 per month/maximum 300 downloads*
*Only for members who signed up before October 8th, and only if you sign up for Premium by November 8th.
Post your predictions when this company goes belly up. My guess is March 12, 2004.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
YES! MICROSOFT! +30943047)&$&097340734 EXCELLENT
You do not deserve instant karma for simply turning every negative concept and applying it to Microsoft. Of course they're not going to start charging timed licenses for their OS. It's not clever, and it's not funny. Stop cheating at life and think of something clever to say.
So, lets just work this out in our heads... how does this end up earning money for them? They won't be getting any NEW subscibers, right? (Nobody I know was saying, "Man, i'd love to sign up for that service, but darn it, it's just not nearly limited enough!")
And it's not like there are no alternatives where unlimited music downloads are available, right?
Right now thier customers are those people who are kind enough to give them a break and not go and download thier songs from kazaa. How does kind of action help them at all?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
> Stop cheating at life and think of something clever to say.
;-)
I for one welcome our new clever, non-cheating overlords.......
Cancel link
...unfortunately they've taken some serious turns for the worse this year... the change to a proprietary download manager was a real mess.
So I've taken the opportunity to download a good few thousand emp files and cancelled my subscription. I'm not sure whether this will let me download at will later on, but, hey, it's possible...
I read the email from emusic as soon as it had landed in my inbox, and the change did annoy me, especially the fact that they buried it 3/4ths of the way down, where presumably they thought folks weren't going to read it.
Still, I think I'm probably going to keep the subscription since I average about 3 albums a month anyhow. I just wish they would let unused downloads accrue.
The really annoying thing for me about Emusic is that I can't access certain albums from Europe, and I'm too lazy to change my billing info and set up a proxy server.
____________________________________
-- I beleve you'll like this -->
From reading all the "I just unsubscribed" postings, it sounds like the only group that will come out of this ahead of the game are the people that just sold emusic..
Trolling is a art,
eMusic was, I thought, a great concept: unlimited downloads, unrestricted MP3 files and a large selection of non-mainstream, but often interesting music.
They've recently started limiting their downloads and now, following the takeover by "Dimensional" officialy made my $10/month unlimited plan limited to 40 downloads per month. The $50/plan, 5 times as expensive allows download of only 300 songs.
For me, it's no longer worth it. There just hasn't been any interesting new albums on the site, not enough to warrant this huge increase in price.
-Bill
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
People who missed the article about a week or so ago should check out magnatune.com. I'm _not_ affiliated or anything, and it is a new-ish service (read: needs artists, but needs customers, but needs artists...), but as the artists retain copyright and share profits 50/50 with magnatune itself, and as you can pretty much name your own album price (well, $5 and up), it seems like it solves a lot of problems many /.'ers complain about w.r.t. digital music pay/download sites. I believe Wired has/had an article mentioning them a couple days ago or so, too.
As the site is somewhat newish, it does have one big kink that I've already reported; specifically, when I bought an album last week and accidentally closed the browser partway through d/l'ing the tracks, there wasn't any way to get back to that page w/o paying again. I got my songs anyway, but probably not in the way magnatune wanted me to. That aside, the site works well and feels rather clean... very refreshing.
In my opinion this was the only good music subscription service, because you could download as many files as you wanted, for $9.99 a month and most of them where VBR mp3's, no WMA DRM protected crap. I was thinking this was the best way to get music legally, because they were constantly adding more record labels, but as we see things change, this will encourage more people to try p2p music sharing I think.
The problem is I don't know what I want. I already have every CD by every band that I know that I like. As I can tell from a 56kbit mono OGG file whether I like the music or not I can then either buy the album or not, my choice.
Small files. Fast downloads. Free advertising for the bands, rather than 'digital pillaging on the cyber-high-seas'. Lets you 'try before you buy'. etc etc.
That's what I want. I'll pay for it by buying more regular CDs if it recommends some good stuff to me.
I might be offtopic because it doesn't seem to apply to this particular service, but this problem applies especially to stores like the Apple online music store. Songs are sold at 1$ a song. That seems pretty reasonable in the US, where an 12-13 songs album is sold 15-16US$.
(Of course you might want to say the price in kinda inflated compared to the price the music industry sells their CDs to the store. Especially if they sell it for 8$ and the middle man adds 9$ for shipping, paying it's workers, etc. But that's another debate. And if someone has numbers on this, I'd really be interrested.)
The catch is : these prices are good only in the United States as far as I'm concerned. Here in Canada, I usually pay 16 CANADIAN dollars for an album, including taxes (yeah, CD prices are THAT good in Canada, and at this price, they're not only Britney Spears CD. For example, I bought the "3 Days Grace" CD two weeks ago for 13CAN$, tax included. Excellent CD, worth every penny ). That's like 12US$. Now you see, for 12$ dollars, on Apples IMusic store, I can either buy 12 MP3 or whatever the format is of my favorite album (assuming I'm buying a whole album, and frankly, I've had the chance to buy excellent albums in the past where every song is worth the purchase), or for the same price, get the real CD with the lyrics booklet and the CD case. Which one do you think I'm going to buy, especially in the case of the 3 Days Grace CD I bought which cost me 13CAN$. I mean, if I bought it on the Apple music store, it would have cost me 12US$ (16CAN$) and I wouldn't even have the lyrics and CD case. Plus I'd be stuck with songs only playable by me.
Unless there's a Canadian version of these stores where songs are sold 75US cents (current exchange rate) or 1CAN$, I don't see how these companies are going to be really popular outside the US, or at least in Canada. I'm wondering at what price CD sells on other continents.
AFAIK it's still the only online music service without DRM. Not to mention Linux support (although it does taking a bit of work to get that set up).
That said, I tend to forget about it for months at a time, and then go and download 5 or 6 albums in a day. I was already at the point where the service was just barely worth it, and the new pricing structure just tipped the scales.
Despite repeated attempts to characterize it as such, Emusic has never been an unlimited download service. An arbitrary limit of 2000 songs per month was established on every account. Of course, Emusic never bothered to tell anyone about this limit until they actually went over, at which point their account was cancelled and money refunded.
With a business strategy like this, it's not hard to see why Emusic is being acquired. Unfortunately, it's hard to see how this new pricing structure will work any better with a music catalog that is decidedly obscure.
END OF LINE
In Soviet Russia, life cheats you!
Oh wait that applies everywhere...
This is still cheaper that the $1 a track that apple's music download service. $9.99 for 40 tracks breaks down to roughly $.25 for a single song, which is still pretty cheap if you ask me.
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
If I subscribe at the monthly rate $9.99, then over the course of a year, I'll pay $119.88 and download 480 songs.
If I opt for the $50/month subscription and CHOOSE to subscribe twice a year, every SIX months, then I'll pay only $100 and be able to download 600 songs. I can use the time lag to see if they can indeed add to their song catalog in the meantime and wait for something worth downloading (good music, good quality files, etc) to be added.
Not only that, but the time lag ALSO allows me to go elsewhere to their competitors (or to Newsgroups, overseas web/ftp sites, IRC for that matter).
Encouraging your revenue sources to go elsewhere away isn't a good idea, to say the least.
RIAA free music.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Businesses strive to max out the revenue while minimizing the costs.
In theory this development is kept in check by competitor which offer cheaper and better serives which drain customers away.
In practice this is however very different. Very often customers are restricted in their right to choose or simply the competitors aren't there or adequate.
At this stage the goverment and the judicative come into play. They should protect the customers from unfair business practices pulling back the level of opportunity back to them.
Unfortunately we see in current goverment (Republican/Bush administration) and judicative a certain trend to restrict this pro customer regulations. The results are failing "don't call lists", country wide power shortage and Enron finance scandals.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I don't get it. Even the basic subscription is $9.99/40 tracks = $.25
That's a quarter per download. That's a better price than iTunes. I'm not up to speed on the particulars of both services (i.e., digital restrictions management, avilability inside/outside the US, etc), but they are company trying to make a profit.
Now, if they came in and said, "by subscribing to our service you agree to buy musix *only* from us," that would be a different story. As it stands, you are free to get music somewhere else if it suits you.
It doesn't matter, Kazaa service is still unlimited downloads!
RRS, aka The Notorious BOB
www.notoriousbob.co.nr
For unlimited downloads you can still go there.
It was nice of them to me the notice one month in advance. I will leech as much as I can before cancelling my account on November 7th.
I actually just cancelled my membership not long ago a bit before my 3 month subscription was up. After my 3 months was up, they pretty much ignored the cancellation and charged me for another month. I had to contact customer support again to get it removed.
Well, I can't figure out why people are looking at pay services (except for backlists of singers).
Vivendi's mp3.com and iuma.com have hundreds of thousands of free mp3's. You can use iRATE radio to discovery all sorts of free legal mp3's.
You can find out about the best free mp3's at gods of music among other places.
My essay sharethemusicday.com gives more information about how to find out about legal mp3's and legal ways to share the music.
The big question is when vivendi will start charging money for mp3.com. If they do, then either singers will host their music elsewhere, or else cause vivendi to sell this music or music subscriptions at a reasonable price.
With the recent acquisition by NBC of Universal/Vivendi, my guess is that there will be more pressure for vivendi to squeeze money out of mp3.com
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Then again, I shouldn't complain seeing as though I used my $15/month subscription to download about 40GB of music over the course of three months, so I guess I got my money's worth. :P
Forty downloads though? What if you want to download a Gore Beyond Necropsy album? Seems you wouldn't be getting your money's worth at all. You'd blow all 40 songs on part of one album and end up with less than an hour of music.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
I really liked emusic and recommended it to a lot of people, but as others have noted, this change takes away the best thing about them: the ability to download albums by people you've never heard of before and give them a try. With a limit of 3 CDs worth of music per month, I would only want to download sure things rather than taking risks, at which point I'd be happier buying the CD used.
Oh well. I'll just download as much as I can in the next couple of weeks and then cancel, as I'm sure a large percentage of their current customers will.
WOONSOCKET, RI: In other news, users of popular peer-to-peer file-swapping networks like Kazaa, Bearshare, and Gnutella were shocked on Thursday by the announcement that these networks would also cease to provide unlimited downloads. "I'm going to go rob a record store" said Ken Schnizzle, bassist for the local Nirvana tribute band 'Seeping Brain Tissue', "because that's about the only way I can get unlimited music now!"
I've been an EMusic subscriber for a couple years now, and have been an avid fan of their service the entire time. For me, the ENTIRE POINT of EMusic (over and above the iTunes store) was being able to try out new music without any penalty. I could download what I wanted, and if it sucked I could delete it without feeling remorse over wasting (money | download credits | whatever). Given the fact that EMusic's catalog consisted mostly of independent / unknown bands, this was a critically important aspect of their service.
EMusic was the means by which I discovered dozens of new bands to love. For that, I owe them thanks. But for the clueless greedy scum that have bought them, I have nothing but scorn. They can shove their download quotas and their ridiculously overpriced subscription plans. Subscription CANCELED.
I applaud the vision behind Emusic's business model, but it's wacky and unsustainable in that ugly dot-com sorta that's all too familiar. Anyone else ask themselves how they were sustaining UNLIMITED downloads for $9.99? If you have to ask that question, you're probably right in being perplexed. As far as I know bandwidth still costs money. Compare it to a gas station offering unlimited gas for $50 a month.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
This is the worst news of the week. EMusic was the site I pointed everyone to to say, "look, there is a service offering high-quality, no-DRM restricted mp3s with unlimited downloading for a (more than) fair price." The unlimited downloading is the ENTIRE POINT of EMusic. This gives you the freedom to discover new artists without fear of being charged for it. This more than made up for the fact that they didn't have major bands, as the had an entire system in place for music discovery (their My List feature was ingenious). Where else would I have found Reggie and the Full Effect, or St. Thomas? Arrrrggghhh! I'm so mad I could go on, but I have to go download as much as possible right now!
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
Of course I just joined again a week ago. I had joined a couple years ago, then didn't renew after a year, but after hearing that they upgraded to 192kps I thought I'd see what they had and decided to join again.
My first reaction was to immediately cancel, but the truth is, the price is still better than buying the cd's assuming that they continue to have albums I want.
The sad thing is that with unlimited downloads, E-music was a great way to experiment with bands I had never listened to before, now I'll have to be more selective in what I download.
If they expand their catalog, I'll keep my subscription, if not I'll cancel it. The new plan doesn't require a monthly commitment, so maybe I'll just cancel after I've downloaded what I want, then wait until they get new stuff I want before joining again.
If they get rid of being able to see everything they have before joining, I won't be going back.
Rob
NEOS
In order to respond to these ongoing challenges and maintain a compelling service for our valued customers, EMusic will be making a number of significant changes in the coming weeks and months. As part of these changes, we will be discontinuing the current unlimited service plan and replacing it with a new service offering, as described above.
Wow! If they value their customer anymore, they may have to stop downloads alltogether!
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Damnit!
A couple months ago, I found out about the joy of eMusic from some post here. So, I did the trial, and that went well. I wanted to sign up for 3 months @ 14.95/mo, but didn't have the money at the time. And still wanted to do it, but still didn't have the money... UNTIL NOW. Literally. Today I got an email from my college letting me know that my school loan surplus is being direct deposited into my account. So today (or tommorow) I was going to sign back up for eMusic, and start the leech-fest.
Crap. Can I still do this- if only until November? I want unlimited downloads. Crap.
what a coincidence- "We're sorry but our messageboards are temporarily unavailable. Stay tuned, the messageboards will available again soon." Pfft.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Really folks, I can't figure some of you out. People who are cancelling their subscriptions over this are being unreasonable.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I've been a subscriber for close to two years. I supported them because it seemed like a fair plan. And lets face it, most of the music on emusic wasn't for the "average" music consumer. I sort of looked at the site as 10 bucks a month for access to the worlds largest cut-out bin. It was good for me because I like blues, jazz and folk music. If you are into contemporary music, forget it. Needless to say, I'll be canceling my sub. I'd rather use itunes if I'm going to be gouged. At least it "works." Half the time on emusic the download manager would just not work, downloading partial files or nothing at all. I give this service 6 months to completely disappear from the radar. Who's going to pay this fee for the music they have? No one.
"Buy now!. Special, limited time offer, available only if....."
haven't you ever heard that before--say, perhaps from a car dealer? Sure it's a limited offer, but I'd be willing to bet that there'll be another special offer next month, and the month after that, and the month after that....
Well, thats put the kibosh on that one then. As an emusic subscriber, I was very vocal about how good the service was. It was the kind of offering that I'd been looking for since I first installed Napster all those years ago.
It had a wide range of music, offered high quality encodings and even allowed you to chose your file naming policy. Even better, it was legit and allowed you to feel as if you were working with with the music industry rather than against it.
Of course, on first inspection, the new sub of 40 tracks for 10 dollars seems poor only in comparison to the old (nearly) unlimited service. Up against iTunes et al, 25 cents per song seems like top value for money. But Emusic isn't the same kind of thing. Emusic was a browser's paradise... download an album here, a track there, give them a listen and if you didn't like it, delete and move on. You've lost nothing, the artist has been credited, all is well. After the initial download frenzy of the first few weeks, I found I'd download maybe 20 or 30 albums a month, of which maybe 4 or 5 would be keepers. It gave me a chance to look around genres or artists I'd never heard of, or would never consider risking money on.
But not anymore. Who is going to be experimental in their downloads if every download counts? I can see this being a death knell for Emusic unless they radically revamp their artist catalogue. In fact, thinking about it, it looks as though they're purposefully trying to kill it? Or at the very least, reboot it with different artists and a different userbase.
Oh well, I've submitted my cancellation. And till the end of my subscription I'm going to leech for all I'm worth, in complete disrespect of their 2000 song limit. Sod em.
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
The other thing to think about here is that emusic doesn't have a catalog of new music like other services. They only offer the back catalog (out of print music) from the labels they partner with. So that $10-15/month is for 40-65 tracks that you can't buy on CD, and none that are available on cd. As far as I'm concerned, their niche was taking the back catalog (that wasn't making any money for anyone) and making some money from it. This was great for me since I love jazz and there are a gazillion jazz albums that are out of print but have excellent stuff. For new music, emusic has never been an alternative. Now they're charging for the back catalog as if it were new music. Not interested!
Who did what now?
Anyone want to get together and swap eMusic albums? I'm into jazz and eastern music myself.
unlimited u/d credz for l/d callerz
I finally got fed up and cancelled after they couldn't get a working linux download manager after 3 months. It was a nice service when all it required was a web browser, but the more they mucked about with it, the worse it got.
I've wrestled with reality for 35 years and I'm happy to say, I finally won out - Elwood P. Dowd
If they just did rollover downloads like the cellphone companies do it wouldn't be so bad. Some months I download dozens of albums, others I don't download any.
This doubly sucks as I haven't been able to download anything from emusic.com for about a week now. DL manager just stalls saying Requesting File.
"Never trust a computer you can't throw." -- The Mac
I've supported Emusic as a subscriber from day 1. Now I'm going to leech as much stuff as possible this month and cancel. I bet their pricing plans change again in the near future.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench. A long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
i'm a current subscriber to emusic, and i was under the impression that i had a contractual agreement. i suppose i need to speak with my friend who studies arbitration about this. i suppose there is something in their terms of service which mentions they can change their terms at a months notice. hardly fair if i cannot cancel my subscription at a months notice.
i guess i have a month to leech as much off them as i want. it's a shame really. i didnt download that much (5 or 6 cds a month). this was mainly because i always thought that i could get the stuff when ever i wanted. since i sit infront of a computer at school. i can download 5 or 6 songs in an hour.
-- john
Oh well. Back to kazaa.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
So I registered for the 3 month service ($15 a month) last Sunday and started downloading. Now, you only can queue 45 tracks at any given time, which is a real pain (I considered scripting something to aid me on this, but never got around to it). But whenever I was at my machine, I'd click on new albums to download. Finding good artists was easy--EMusic doesn't have the absolute widest selection--so I just started at CCR, downloading every single album, and went right through 'till I realized on Tuesday that I had nearly 4000 tracks. W00t.
Well, on Teusday, when I was sorta coming off that initial orgy of downloading, I got the following e-mail from EMusic:
Now, just to make it clear to anyone who missed the implications: my usage patterns apparently matched those of a 'bot (and why not--I was a machine!). So EMusic cancelled my subscription and refunded my service fee. I got 4000 MP3s, legally, for absolutely free. So as I said, w00t. Too bad this service isn't around any more.
I never signed onto e-music, despite good things about it, for a very simple reason: I don't do MP3s. Call me a purist but I'll wait for Ogg. It's pretty much already there but I'm waiting for the portable that has all I want and supports it. The argument that that's the way it oughta be is sufficient for me.
I haven't bought into other pay download services, because I think the pricing is ridiculous. If I purchase a song online, I would expect it to be equivalent to what I get buying a CD - that is, the full digital information, unencumbered by digital rights management. The information to do with as I choose within the boundaries of law (I won't buy a CD that doesn't meet these requirements). I think it is reasonable to expect that the price will be significantly reduced from the per track price of a CD, since I am already paying for bandwidth to receive the content as well as the physical media to store it, and I'm not receiving a physical disc as an archive and portability tool (i.e. if I want to play it in my car CD player I have to buy a blank CD and burn it on my own drive). 3 bucks is not, in my opinion, a reasonable price for the digital transfer of an album of compressed tracks. iTunes is worse: a dollar for a compressed track with DRM is simply a joke.
It all illustrates the bottom line of what's wrong with the conventional music industry: they are a hidebound, greedy, innefficient, inflexible and monolithic monster, and those services that emulate them are headed in the same direction as the conventional industry (isn't this round two in the whole eMusic thing? I seem to recall some unpleasantness previously about hassling customers for "abusing" the system with excessive downloading, generating a bunch of ill will that motivated them to make it truly unlimited in the first place). Even beyond the compression and DRM issues, comparing services like this to CD prices ignores the fact that CDs are far too expensive in the first place. Here you have a mature technology, economies of scale up the wazoo, yet the price does not go down. Meanwhile the technology of home burning is to the extent that if you cannot produce a CD-R copy for less than a dollar you're doing something seriously wrong. Yet I'm expected to hand Apple a dollar for a single track of compressed and encumbered audio, delivered through the internet access I pay for, onto the very expensive Apple computer I paid for, and if I want it on external media w(which I can't play on my CD players in the car, the boombox, my portable), I have to buy the media and assume the cost of the time (both my own and clocking against the inevitable eventual failure of my burner)?
I give my friend a couple hundred dollars every couple of years and I receive something in the area of 30, 40 CDs, many of them one-of-a-kind, with hand-crafted covers, sent to me in the mail and handed to me during visits. They are full audio format and totally unencumbered. He is an independent musician, self-supporting (no day job), and I doubt very much that the vast majority of people here have ever heard of him. The CDs end up costing me less than 5 bucks and I can do whatever I want with them, and he's a thousand times superior to anything I can find on the radio dial. This is the reality of the technological revolution in music and it is so far under the radar of conventional industry that it is not even visible to most. Yet the economics are there. He does not even bother with the digital access component because CD-Rs are so cheap to burn.
When you can go a bunch of places and pick up MP3s for free, and eMusic expects you to pay 25 cents a piece, there is simply something wrong with the picture, and what is wrong with the picture is the people who own the copyrights, who insist on that product being a crazy magic money creation machine.
Right here, right no
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
... policy is altered. To wit:
Although our current privacy policy remains in effect, http://www.emusic.com/help/privacy_policy.html, when the acquisition is completed, EMusic's privacy policy will be changing to reflect Dimensional's ownership and your Personal Information (as defined in the privacy policy) will be transferred to Dimensional. Please take a few moments to review this our new policy which will take effect around October 30, 2003. As always, EMusic is firmly committed to consumer privacy and we believe the new policy continues to reinforce this.
Emusic emphasizes that they are committed to their privacy policy as it exists but there is no such claim about or from Dimensional Associates.
Ironic too is the statement,
"Dimensional plans to continue enhancing the EMusic service with new features and content and you can look forward to hearing more once the acquisition has been completed."
Cutting the downloads and jacking up the prices is an enhancement?
Sounds like Dimensional does not in any way really share in Emusic's philosophy and goals. Another hope slaughtered by greed.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I signed up for the free trial and downloaded their free 50 in 2 days... $.25 a song is definetly a bargin, but it's such a drastic move from where they once were...
Who doesn't like free music?
Someone decided to kill emusic.com, apparently. "Unlimited" used to mean "under 2000 tracks a month". For $10, it was a good deal. Now I'm being told as a subscriber, I have the privilege of paying $50/month to be able to download 300 tracks. That's more than a thirty-fold price increase! It's the same as saying my subscription cost is going from $10/month to $333/month. Not going to happen. I would have put up with a 2x or even 3x price increase. But not this. I also see the emusic message boards have been shut down, another bad sign. At $10/month for a measly 40 tracks, I be going back to buying used CDs instead. I suspect their customer base will be leaving in droves, and undoubtedly some of them will go back to running p2p apps they had shut down when they discovered emusic. Emusic.com: it was too good, so it had to be killed.
nobody is saying that $0.25/download is unreasonable. I'd like you to find one post that says so.
The problem is that you are paying the full price wether or not you actually download 40 songs. Being a mostly indie site, you may rarely have any idea what you are downloading. You may download 40 songs before you even find one group that interests you (unless you only stay with groups you aleady know).
Another problem is that it's subscription, unlike iTunes. That is, if I downloaded 12 song's in three months from iTunes, I pay $12. If I download 12 songs from eMusic in three months I pay $30. Before you say that then I shouldn't have an eMusic subscription, it's a matter of how my time is used - I might go three months between actually having time to spend an evening downloading, at which point I may want to download a lot more than 40 songs.
Especially if I'm experimenting, I may want to download a couple of hundred songs, and end up keeping only 50 or 60. If I get the $50 subscription, those 50 or 60 songs just cost me $150. That's $3 song, based on my usage. Naturally I shouldn't get that plan - however, now none of the plans they offer are sufficient.
I'd be happy to pay $10/month for 40 songs if, as someone else mentioned, unused downloads carry over. I might even go for the $15/month plan.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
So let me get this straight... if you don't contact them, they will automatically and unilaterally swtich you over to the new "basic" service.
That, my friends, sounds plain illegal. It would be in the UK, at any rate, and UK and US contract law are very similar. If I sign up for one thing, emusic cannot unilaterally decide to give me something else. I have to accept it first. And it's a basic principle of contract law that silence does not amount amount to an acceptance. I can't tell someone "I offer to sell this piece of paper for $500, and if you don't tell me otherwise then I will deem you to have accepted it".
Of course, there's an exception here where there are terms in the original contract allowing one side to unilaterally change the terms. So eg a credit card agreement always allows the card company to change the interest rate. But (at least in the UK), these changes can only be allowed if they are fair and reasonable. If I sign up for an unlimited download service and that's reduced to 40 a month or whatever it was, that's a pretty major change. I don't think any court would regard that as a fair and reasonable change, even if permitted in the original contract.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
I just found out about allofmp3.com last night when I was looking for a rush song and I didn't want to go out and buy the cd(it was late at night). It's a russian site so I'm not sure of the legitimacy of it. $15/month unlimited downloads or $.01/meg metered. It was pretty nice paying $.06 for a song rather than spending $15 on a cd so I could get that one song.
I was browsing their site last night and planned to join on Friday, and I seem to remember that they were offering 100 free downloads per trial subscription. Now suddenly with this annoucement it has been cut down to 50 freebies.
Now I'm glad I did not join because I also did not realize that their definition of "unlimited" did not match the standard English dictionary definition. 2000 |= unlimited
All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed.
Cost of Cell phone bill Cost of internet access cable/Satellite bill 50.00 for 300 mp3's or Unlimited access to everythign your little heart desires Free what would you choose
Damn republicans always ruining everything
I understand EMusic's point of view; bandwidth isn't cheap (enough). At a $9.95 unlimited rate (or $14.95, for you three month subscribers), there's a significant cost to serving up this data. I myself downloaded about 7 gigs of data in just the first three days. Yes, I got the warning note from them on that. No, the downloads weren't automated. =) I actually wrote them an email message about that, noting that 1) I was probably exhibiting typical activity for a first month subscriber; and 2) I don't mind limits, so long as they make those limits known. Make your expectations clear, and all is well. Say it's unlimited first and then reveal that -- whoops -- it's not...that's just poor business policy.
However, iTunes this is not. You don't get the latest tracks on this service -- you get the ones *not* signed by the RIAA. Pay $0.99 a track for the latest top 40 nonsense? Sure! Pay $0.25 for B-grade music? Um...maybe. You're not usually paying top dollar for these CDs. (I'm not even touching the argument about how top 40 music is lame or all sounds the same. Go away.)
The 40 download limit for $9.95 is ludicrous. I, and many EMusic subscribers, would never pay that much. If all tracks were guaranteed CD quality, maybe. However, I've downloaded a few albums from them that were 128 CBR MP3. Yuck. They are making progress; all new stuff is encoded in VBR. Plus, without the RIAA artists, the collection feels a little...aged. Ironically, I do like the fact that they are announcing this model. Coming clean and making their expectations known is definitely the way to go. Now they just need to tweak their model.
I'm wondering how this will all turn out. I'm betting they're going to see a mass exodus, based on this new pricing scheme. I'm certainly angling that way.
Or the word 'backups' which appear to have euphamistically replaced the word 'pirate copy' in the warez arena. Often accompanied by some nonsensical claim about copied games being 'for backup purpose only'.
I've been using office-exchange.com at work since IT started warning us against downloading mp3s. Basically it lets you maintain a list of your own music, movies, etc. and then request things out of the libraries of the people you work with. They get an email asking to deliver the movie or music to you. It works great for DVDs or for technical books. Since only the original media is shared, it's legal and IT won't throw a fit.
Dear Emusic Customers,
Please cancel your subscriptions so that the music industry can complain about the lack of subscribers.
To encourage cooperation, our services will be watered down considerably.
Thanks,
Darla McBride
President
Dimensional Associates LLC
This is shocking news. 40 tracks per month? I'm going to go from 2000 to 40 at the same price? "Special offer, one for the price of fifty! Don't delay; you might miss out on the deal of a lifetime! We're not going to be around for long, you know!"
I'm trying to keep a perspective on things though. After all, it's not so much that the new terms are a bad deal, but that the old ones were unbelievably good. Impossibly good, in fact.
What remains is a service that sells MP3's encoded with lame --alt-preset standard and no DRM crap at 25 cents per track.
It actually sounds pretty good when you put it like that. But the problem for current subscribers is that it completely changes the way you use the service. Before, EMusic was a grand buffet. You paid the cover and took what you wanted. Now, every download is a purchasing decision.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Well, would you?
which can be found here: http://www.emusic.com/bem/new_signup/terms.html
i must admit that the unlimited downloads (well not quite because they cut your service if you exceed 2000 songs in a month, but that was enought for me) was a big selling point for me. here is the important part the emphisis added:
2. MODIFICATION
We may add, delete or modify any of the aspects of our Service and/or any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement at any time in our sole discretion. We will notify you of any such changes via email or by posting a change notice on our site at http://www.emusic.com/subscriptions/ If any modification is unacceptable to you, you must stop using the Service. Unless otherwise specifically set forth in our notice, all changes be effective upon the date we notify you of the same ("effective date"). Your continued use of the Service following the effective date will constitute your binding acceptance of and agreement to be bound by the changes specified therein. You should check back frequently and review the terms and conditions of this agreement regularly so you are aware of the most current rights and obligations that apply to you and the terms and conditions of your agreement with us. If any new products or services become available, they will be considered a part of the Service and your use of them will be governed by the terms and conditions of this Agreement unless we notify you that different terms and conditions apply. You must also comply with any additional terms which apply to third-party content, material, information, software or other services.
-- john
We are also unique in our focus on music from the leading independent labels. Unlike other services, we understand that many music consumers want to go beyond the Billboard charts. We remain firmly committed to continuing to provide avid music fans an alternative to the mainstream.
What about IUMA? Not only do they seem to provide everything EMusic states. They do it for free
It amazes me that the company has changed their policy going forward, yet their website still lists their service as offering unlimited MP3s.
I subscribed to the old emusic service for the following reasons.
A. I think that musicians and distributors should get reembursed for music downloads (though NOT at CD comparable prices -- the distribution is much more efficient and economically speaking _should_ be cheaper). The old EMusic represented a great transition from the bad old day of CDs and the coming good days of ubiquitous accepted and legal P2P. I don't use P2P services at the moment. Though once more musicians start releasing music with licenses that allow for free distribution I look forward to using the more efficient P2P distribution mechanism. It will happen. Markets drive towards efficiency and squeeze out the fat. I'm patient.
B. I used the OLD emusic service as an irregular downloader -- I will go for a long time without downloading anything but then get in the mood and download quite a bit. I am sure that my average usage is under the 40 songs per month -- but with my style of use I'd either have to pay a lot or not be able to download what I want. Your new pricing model doesn't work for me. If unused downloads accumulated so that I could use them later I would be interested.
C. I used MP3s as a way to check out obscure Jazz and Folks artists -- who I wouldn't find otherwise (CD stores typically have pretty poor collections). I'll buy a CD from an artist that I've heard and liked -- either live or on MP3s but I rarely spring 16 dollars for an artist I don't know anything about. With the EMusic I could download the album -- knowing that I'd paid fairly for the music and the service -- and if I like it I can keep it and might later on seek out a CD by that artist. If I don't like what I sample I can delete it and move on. Again your new pricing model doesn't work with this usage.
I expect that most other users are in a similar situation and will cancel. I hope that your cash flow position is such that you can withstand the upcoming drought -- at least long enough to come up with (and implement and advertise) a better policy.
To the outgoing management -- good luck, you did a good thing.
CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!
$10 may not seem like much to you, but it's a lot to a working family. ...you insensitive clod!
You people will never learn, why do you have a sub in the first place???. Compaines make enough money. Long live P2P
Great explanation! I wish I had mod points. MOD PARENT UP!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
THE cell phone companies? Are you saying this is widespread? I'm not aware that Verizon does this (at least on the low end plans). If you want to see REAL rip-off artists, look at the cellular companies.
Now I'm gonna just download 2000 songs and get a rebate as well. I'd feel bad doing that to eMusic, but "Dimensional Associates LLC" ?
Screw 'em.
I've long been a supporter of emusic, but it's got a major flaw in that it's only got smaller artists and then only their back catalogs for the most part. There's little reason for somebody to do anything other than go there the first month of their subscription, grab all the old stuff, and then cancel.
I've said this repeatedly, but I would pay more per month for a service like this, if I could get the latest releases and I could have a larger selection. The thing that was nice was that they did have Metropolis, one of my favorite labels, but didn't have some of their best artists (VNV Nation) or latest releases of what they do have.
So, this seemed as good an excuse as any and I've canceled my subscription. Haven't really used it in a few months anyhow.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I generally agree with your sentiment (and have ripped my fair share of tracks to ogg,, but it's a bitch finding hardware support for ogg's (mp3 cd players) and last time I checked 6 months ago, I didn't find much software support in Windows for burning ogg's onto audio CD's. (especially for burning oggs and mp3's onto the same audio CD ). At walmart you can buy a cheapo cd/mp3 player for $30. If I could buy an ogg cd player for 75$, believe me, I'd buy it. But I don't see this kind of thing anyway. Please rescue me from my ignorance!
(well I just googled around and found this visual-mp3 .
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Give my regards to oblivion.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Let the moderators do their work in the background, they don't need direction, it just adds to the noise.
I see a problem here. A moderator actually made an incorrect moderation, and it was pointed out. As long as moderators do a good job I think it is fine to let them work in the background, but that was not the case here. Now one thing that is worse than moderators making mistakes is people like you posting anonymously requesting comments to be moderated down. It is no surprise you got modded down yourself, the only problem is, that because you were posting anonymously moderating you down doesn't help the least bit. Personally I normally only see comments with score at least 1, because otherwise I see all those Anonymous Troll comments, which doesn't always get a -1 score simply because there are more trolls than moderators. Occationally I follow the below threshold links, but most of the time I regret I did, because 90% of the time moderators were right in moding something down. However in this particular case you were responsible for a perfectly valid point getting modded down. Moderators please don't listen to Anonymous Cowards requesting registred users comments to be modded down.
Tell me more, tell me more
My 3 month contract expired, but they extended it and charged another 15 bucks on my cc without even asking me. grrr.
I've been a subscriber for over 3 years now, but after they couldn't provide me with a way to download music in linux, I've set up an old win box specifically to pull down everything I can, so that I can cancel my subscription.
Such a shame, as they really were the perfect service 3 years ago, and allowed me to boycott the RIAA, while still getting plenty of great music.
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
* Changing to VBR was good, but...
* Emailing you claiming "excessive usage" was BAD, especially when I was just trying to re-download my catalog.
* Limiting the number of things you could have in the queue was lame. I used to queue up a few albums and go to sleep. That was put to an end. =/
I cancelled my subscription about 3 weeks ago. I was considering going back, until today....
Gee, this makes me want to sign up, and then cancel on 11/8.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
A lot of whats on eMusic is utter crap (on the site because it has no other channels of distribution), not worth the $0.04 of hard drive space it takes up. And that was OK, because there's some good stuff in there, too. With unlimited downloads and a little paitience you could download 30 albums in a month and keep the 3-10 that didn't suck.
True, it has some good back catalogs (Epitaph, Lookout!, CCR), but it also has a lot of 2nd and 3rd rate stuff by 1st rate artists, especially in the jazz section, and how do you pick which of the 15 Miles Davis records is worth keeping? You donwload them all and listen.
Now, I am guilty, as I'm sure many of you were of hammering the site from time to time (especially as my subscription was ending). And maybe limits of some kind are in order.. but 40 tracks? Thats ONE A.C. album, which I was happy to check out under the unlimited plan (funny song names, crappy songs), but would be the only thing I'd be able to get in a month under the new plan. Same goes for a lot of the spoken word stuff... You couldn't even download ONE George Carlin double CD.
Sadly, this will be the death of a once good service
$50 for 300 songs is not a bad deal. Why don't you go buy 300 songs on roughly 30 CDs sold at music stores and look at your tab.
Jeez Louise.
This is the same sort of whining when various WEB content that had been previously free suddenly required an account post the dot com bubble.
Deal with it. Things cost money to produce, WEB content, music, yada, yada, yada.
Quit your b*tchin'.
-M
IANAL, but what's up with that? Anyone have their original terms of service handy? How can they change the terms out from under a contract? Subscribers committed to a set period. Doesn't that period apply to the other participant on the contract?
gotten the scoop on this story! Rock on!
I subscribed to Emusic for almost a year, and downloaded hundreds of songs. They did almost everything right with their service, other than not having much big-name stuff. The site was easy to navigate and the songs were plain MP3s with no DRM in sight.
Now they want to limit you to 40 downloads a month for $10? 300 downloads for $50? Are they insane? I bet their cancellation rate will be 90%. If they had big name music maybe, but otherwise forget it.
How about making low quality mp3's, say 56kbps, available for unlimited download. Or capped at, say, 500. Then, if I like them I can always download the HQ versions, or buy the CD.
VPS-like shared hosting, on under-crowded servers.
EMusic was a wonderful service. Browse through their albums, get the link for the album you want to download, and go. But $9.95 a month for 40 TRACKS?! Fudge that, I'll go use one of the many P2P networks and steal my music. Alternatively, as FTP file serving is making a delightful comeback, my friends and I can set up a safe little haven of file swapping...
/. many times. But, my account is getting cancelled today, after I leech a mighty pile of new music. Goodbye, oh savior of the music industry. Hello, bitch of the recording industry.
I've been an EMusic member for quite a while, and have preached about the beauty of this service here on
-agent oranje.
..a few months ago. After 2 months I had downloaded all the stuff I was interested in. After that, kept downloading but didn't like the music so I deleted it. After realizing they weren't offering new music very often, I demanded they terminate my account.
Blar.
I just signed up for eMusic last month when people were talking about it here. I feel I got a good selection of albums for my $14... but I was starting to run out of things I really wanted to download without branching out and trying new stuff.
I'm never going to pay per track, so Apple and MusicMatch are out.
Who are the alternatives now?
--Darren
http://www.kazaalite.tk
All the tunes ya want, and for free.
This post made with the Dvorak layout.
"Friends don't let friends use QWERTY"
I can't imagine that they'll last. I bet they'll fold within 6 months. Right now I'm having a hell of a time even downloading a few tracks. Their biggest problem was the implied "unlimited" download. They should have never done that in the first place. Sure, 9.99 isn't terrible for 40 songs, but when I've had unlimited songs (or 2000, whatever) available to me for the past few years, $9.99 isn't looking so good.
Well, looks like I'll be hurriedly downloading the rest of the Beggar's Banquet/4AD catalog and then cancelling my subscription and going back to the usual licit (used CD stores, eBay, GEMM) and illicit (Usenet) sources.
Sooner or later, the music industry will get a handle on the concept of "the highest price the market will bear". For me, it actually was more than ten bucks a month, but it's well under fifty. For fifty bucks, I expect to see the band live, thankyouverymuch.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I quit Emusic when they began requiring the use of their own DL manager. Mind you, this wasn't just about a software preference, their DL manager didn't even work in Linux at first. I was ticked and many people chided me for being a bit over-reactive. Recently I had been considering swallowing my pride and signing back up. Appears that won't be happening now.
Someone must be "smoking crack" if they think massive amounts of people will pay $50 per month for muscic downloads.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Hi,
I've been a subscriber to Emusic and mostly liked it (except for the fact that their braindead download manager was horrific under Linux, but there's always Perl to get around that...).
With this change I'll cancel my subscription and move to http://www.allofmp3.com . They are based out of Russia and at least over there seem to be legal. They basically have two account types:
* Unlimited where you pay $0.01/Mbyte
* Monthly where you pay $14.95/month and can download up to 1000 songs
The cool thing is that for most albums you can select the bitrate/codec that you'd like them encoded in. They normally use LAME and yes, they even support Ogg. AOM currently has over 200000 songs in their inventory, which features most top acts. Depending on where in the world you live this may/may not be a viable option for you
regards,
Heiko
Look at the catalog. We're not talking the Beatles and Eminem here. It's old jazz, old blues, and indie labels on Emusic.
Emusic has Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings, made almost 80 years ago. Armstrong received $50 and never saw another penny in royalties, and he died 30 years ago. Yet there exists some fat whiteboy somewhere who thinks he deserves $1 everytime someone listens to 'West End Blues', because he 'owns' it.
Me too, dude. I just joined, and am loving it. It's too bad that they'll be switching before I can even get a full month or two out of it.
However, I think that if they still allow unlimited sampling--like through the listen-only button, this could be ok. As long as I get to sample it beforehand, I might stay on.
It is a sad day, though. I wonder if the new labels will be worth it. As a side note, I read the new privacy policy. I'm not so sure what it was previously, but it might as well not be there, now.
Time to move on.
Next stop, weblisten and allofmp3
I can find no sign of them on the web (other than this announcement). Hmmm, I wonder who might be interested in destroying EMusic, and making sure this business model is buried once and for all?
if you want to find good, new music check out epitonic.com enjoy
harmonious design
I might sound like a troll, but the impression that I get is that Emusic would still be the cheapest way (still, not free) to get music. I can't think of anywhere else you can get an entire album for the $2-3 (USD) price range. I don't think I'd be downloading enough to pay $50/month, simply because I don't have the time to download 25 albums. However, that is still a damn good bargain compared to getting 3 CD's for the same price. Heck, I wouldn't mind having a deal to get the songs piecemeal for cheap if the quality was guaranteed.
Magnatune (which I found from Slashdot) allows you to try everything before you buy.
http://www.magnatune.com/
plus-good, double-plus-good
hmmm....a mere couple of hours before iTunes announces the Windows version......
$.25 per song does not seem unreasonable to me. I doubt I could even find 40 songs per month that I'd want to download. But for those who claim they do a lot of browsing to find new songs, what if emusic would implement unlimited samples. Would you be satisified with a 30 second clip of every song? And those who complain about the selection of songs. The only reason it has been so cheap to this point (and still very cheap in my opinion) is because of the limited Big Names which usually carry Big price tags along.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Obscure tracks was one thing, but ws always nice to find those bands which for one reason or another weren't well known. They also supported Linux with their download manager. The previous downloads was set to 200, something I had never reached anyway, but the new limit seems to little.
The final nail came with this site:
http://www.allofmp3.com which is a Russian site (has an English page though) and they carry a far greater selection of tracks than emusic ever did for cheaper. Plus you had a better choice on how to pay, you could just pay them a lump sum for a certain amount of data ($10 gets you a gigabyte worth), or you can pay $14.95 per month for unlimited downloads.
The other advantages, you get to choose how its encoded, from MP3 to even Ogg Vorbis!
I have downloaded a track for less than 5 cents, and this from a well known band, compared to the Apple service that is charging 99 cents per song. Its not Apple's fault that they set this higher price, most likely to get a valid license reuires input from the RIAA.
StarTux
I'm going to sign up and cancel... just to show them that I think it sucks. :) Guess have will have to just stick to Magnatune for now and hope they draw more artists. I must say though... the music-to-noise ratio there is pretty good.
Dammit! I literally just signed up yesterday. New plan: download as much music as possible before November 8th, then cancel. Maybe if I get more than 2000 songs, they'll even cancel it for me and save me the trouble! Thanks eMusic!
Don't know if it was intended as funny, either. In any case it's goddamn for real.
Corporations need to understand that people ARE prepared to pay, if served music conveniently in forms THEY want, which is not the form currently pushed.
People will always get music in the most convenient way. Emusic stood a fighting chance, but doesn't with this move. The poster is so right -- it's back to P2P.
Not that P2P is perfect. The first corp to launch a reasonably-priced download-all-you-want service is going to RAKE in money. The key here, however, is CONVENIENCE and QUALITY. P2P has the convenience, but not consistent quality. (For instance, I downloaded a Britney Spears track once by accident; I'm still recovering from the shock.) Anyway, if you can provide both convenience and consistent good quality, then you have a winner.
The "back to Kazaa" comment is VERY real. Is it really that hard to understand one of the basic tenets of capitalism, that you have to give the customer what they want, how they want it, and when they want it, in order to obtain their money?
(And please, no comments about "but Kazaa is stealing" or such. I'm trying to make a point about human behavior and how to shape laws and business in light of that behavior; current laws are not relevant to the argument.)
Anybody else notice the large slowdown in downloading from emusic?
Evidently, everyone is d/ling as much as they can before the limits take effect.
I, for one, do not welcome our new Dimensional overlords.
There are a couple of other choices to legally download mp3's but emusic.com was probably the only one with a good collection of Indie stuff. You might want to try www.allofmp3.com and www.weblisten.com. There is a comparison of these an others at:
http://www.museekster.com/legalmusic.htm
I've been using www.allofmp3.com for about 3 weeks. They offer music at a penny a megabyte (dirt cheap) and you can pay with www.paypal.com (no recurring billing if you don't like) I've spent almost $200 legalizing all the music I downloaded on Napster and the like and I'm going strong.
Wrong. The apple tracks are variable bitrate, so they are nearly lossless. They can be burnt to CD and ripped back out and sound as good as a rip of an original cd.
I just got cable modem access a month ago, and one of the things I was considering was whether to get an emusic subscription again (had it when I used to have DSL). It was a really great deal at 9.99 a month, especially for someone like me with very eclectic musical taste (love punk, electronic, fusion, almost every world music style, 80s pop, polka, etc). I still have probably 60 albums I downloaded from my first subscription (I subscribed for a year). If they had stayed at 9.99 a month I would have joined in a couple months. As it is, forget it. An awful deal.
--David
i leave my monthly subscription going and log in to emusic once every 3-4 months and download 10-15 albums. now i can't do this. despite it being
roughly the same number of tracks. *sigh*
PS - users should to keep in mind that emusic is watermarking all tracks you download using their download manager. The watermarking happens on the client side by the emusicdlm program itself. It also breaks several frames in the mp3.
The mp3s are downloaded unencrypted http from mp3.com with a unique (per user presumably) time-limited URL; a smart http proxy can download the unwatermarked versions for you.
Now there is no more message board--the better to keep us from gathering together with pitchforks and torches--and my last three attempts to download have failed completely. Since this morning I've been dilligently trying to unload "My Stash" (and maybe get up past the 2K mark in the next 30 days). But the Download Manager, as someone says upthread, is moving so slowly that I haven't gone past fifty tracks ALL DAY. So it's not just that they're offering us the gotta-be-a-typo dealbreaker 40/month insult. They're also no longer able to provide the service we've contracted for and which they have not threatened to alter for another month.
have any of you tried wippit.com?
it's in the UK but worth a try
i've been monkeying around in perl trying to get something, has anyone been able to successfully hack something together so i dont have to reinvent the wheel?
-- john
I find it very interesting that a Google search for "Dimensional Associates LLC" returns NOTHING! Looks to me like somebody with deep pockets (read music industry heavy hitters) got tired of the emusic.com business model and decided to kill it off. And I was just thinking about resubscribing.
you have just what i've been looking for. this made my day :)
-- john
I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to cancel my eMusic account or grudgingly accept one of their new plans.
Either way, I figured the smart move would be to download as much as possible before the changes take effect... but tonight I find I can't get a single song to download. Every track says "Download failed." *That* never happened before. Seems like a fair portion of their subscribers have the same idea - download like there's no tomorrow.
For me, at least, the service isn't working at all right now. I wonder to what degree this will expedite the process of reducing their subscriber base.
Enquiring minds want to know...
Unless it's changed, IUMA is unsigned artists. Emusic's artists are all signed to indie labels. At IUMA, any 13-year-old with a copy of Ejay can upload their "music."
As far as I'm aware, the 'online encoding' option is reencoding from 384k mp3s. I'm not sure that this is such a good idea.
oh really? i haven't been able to find another emusic user to download the same track and compare MD5 sums.
- Schieber.mp3)= 70aee364e1de473e7b1059580d228fed5decae47
thats really funny if so. their download manager does deliberately break the MP3 file compared to the data that raw MP3 that comes back before going through the emusicdlm program. thats pathetic if so.
Here are the SHA1s and album+track names from some recent downloads:
Artist: Timo Mass
Album: Presents Music For The Maases Disc 1
SHA1(01-Muse-Sunburn Breaks Again Mix.mp3)= 301448dd9006c95f9886130afd15ae23c0b30599
SHA1(04