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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."
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 $5 so what's the problem?
Aw crap, ninjas!
40 downloads? That's a joke right? The main reason I even subscribed in the first place is so I could just browse around and FIND music I liked. And no, Kazaa dos not make music (ie music you've never heard) easy to find, it only finds things that you already want. At a mere 40 I doubt I'll find much of anything. Hell by the time I did find an artist I liked I'd probably be at my cap anyway. It's really sad considering how much I've been preaching about emusic.com and now it's been completely fucked up.
YES! MICROSOFT! +30943047)&$&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.
Well, now they can make guaranteed payouts to rights holders; I'm not so sure this is a death knell. Probably an intense metamorphosis in subscriber base.
We've been saying it on the currently-dead message boards for months -- if all of Emusic's subscribers downloaded as much as we did, they'd expire overnight, taking in less than a penny per track.
It was only a matter of time before they had to revamp their pricing structure. I just didn't expect so drastic of a change.
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
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.
The difference is that EMusic doesn't carry mainstream stuff; it's good music, but it simply isn't worth as much money.
Hmm. Time to change my sig...
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
To bring you up to speed:
The format is MP3 and they say they're keeping it that way. So, no DRM. (That's why Emusic is the only non-CD PC format I get my music in; the CDs are only un-"protected" ones btw. I listen to my music my way, thankyouverymuch.)
They are available around the world but licensing agreements do require them to keep certain tracks available to i.e. North Americans only. Mostly foreign stuff that's supposedly selling well in foreign countries.
Finally, part of the reason Emusic is still cheaper is that their catalog is largely eclectic and indie stuff, with a sprinkling of "sampler" albums from a sprinkling of "popular" artists. That stuff goes cheaper, so it can be sold cheaper. I don't know how much this trend will continue.
I agree with you that they did need to change to be profitable. I just think they made too drastic of a change here.
It's 'bad' because now you get less for the same money.
I've been with them almost a year. My sub runs out in Nov. (Now...it's Nov 7 to be exact)
In that time, I've grabbed about 130 cd's. So maybe 12 cd's per month. 120 tracks on average. Often, I might go a month or two without anything, and then go get a bunch all at once.
With this new d/l limit, I'd have to cut back to 1/3. About 4 cd's per month, for the same price. And no month to month carryover of unused tracks.
Plus, now you'd have to be MUCH more careful about which tracks you actually d/l. Gone will be the concept of "just get the whole album". If I were to continue, I'd pick and choose each track so as to maximise my selections. Previous, if a few tracks on the album sucked...so what. It didn't cost anything extra.
but they are company trying to make a profit.
Right. My question is...were they making a profit before, or is it simply a case of the new owners wanting to make more profit? IMO, they are making a big mistake, and there will be a mass exodus fo current subscribers.
See ya emusic.
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
"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!
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.
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.
If you liked the service so far, it seems waiting till next months deadline would have been a more logical time to cancel... Get all you want until then, and then get out.
Why are you going to cancel? Just because they eliminated the "unlimited" downloads?
That makes absolutely no sense.
People should still be keeping their accounts and *encouraging* this type of non-DRM service. It's still cheaper (much!) than the next-best alternative, iTunes. Although I understand that their new "Privacy policy" leaves something to be desired.
Disclosure: No, I don't have an account, but have long wanted one. $10 may not seem like much to you, but it's a lot to a working family.