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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
The reward, though, is getting turned onto bands that you would have never found out about otherwise. You download 20 CD's in a month, and out of those you find 2 new bands that you think are really cool. You can then check the "you might like" links and branch out from there. Over a couple of years, you wind up with a pretty good education in indie music. It had the potential to really elevate indie music to a new level of acceptance (like IFC & Sundance try to do for indie film).
but not anymore. That's what people are complaining about. I'd be willing to pay more per month, but I won't pay to lose the joys of exploration. The reason eMusic will hurt from this is that their catalog is really not strong enough in mainstream music selections to provide a compelling value proposition other than the joy of exploration. Of the 400-500 CD's (not tracks) I've downloaded, there are probably 100 that I think are really good. That's 20%. At 40 tracks a month, that means I'll average out 8 really good songs a month; if I'm lucky, those will be on one CD & I'll discover - when I'm lucky - 1 new band I like a month.
It's not about the cost per song I like. It's somewhat about the cost of songs I don't like, but moreso about the loss of exploration. It's the same reason people want to hold onto Kazaa, but we were exploring legally & in a socially responsible manner. It's the loss of discovery that's killing me, not the price per song.
Before eMusic, I was not even familiar with Mogwai(!), much less bands like Wheat, South San Gabriel, Mark Eitzel, or Claire Voyant. I'm not in college anymore - eMusic was my connection to new, non-corporate album-oriented music. And now that connection is lost.