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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.
By the way - When will /. offer a subscription with an unlimited number of pages?
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...
I wonder if their catalog will be changing/expanding.
If not...bye bye emusic. It was nice knowing ya.
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.
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.
Cancel link
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 -->
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.
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.
you're getting tracks for 25 cents
In that context perhaps it isn't that bad. Although now I feel like I'm waisting a quarter every time I download and will feel Obligated to download 40 a month reguardless of if I want them or not. Maybe I'll wait it out for a month or so and see if I have problems with the cap. The main issue for me is that I'm a binge downloader. I might download 100 songs in a month, then nothing for 3 months. Now I'm probably just going to end up pissed off that I can't download something. Is that worth flushing $100+ down the toilet per year? Hard to say.
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
>how does this end up earning money for them?
Pyramaths. You just need to keep squeezing. Here's how it works.
You crank your prices by 5%. For one month, you're making 105% of what you were making before.
At the end of the month, 10% of your customers leave. No problem, you crank your prices by another 10%, to 115.5% of your original price. With 90% of the customers, you still make 103.95% of what you were making before you started squeezing.
The next month, another 10% of your customers leave. Can you guess what your response is? Yes, squeeze the remainder.
It sounds insane, but as long as you have one paying customer, you can keep squeezing and squeezing and making more money that you were before.
Unfortunately for EMusic, this model is pretty much predicated on you being able to lock your customers in with proprietary incompatible products, or on them having Federal size budget and being unwilling to admit that they're getting buttfucked. See Microsoft's licensing schemes that (shock!) always seem to cost you more after each revision, and Windows for Warfare on Navy boats. Also see music sellers - sorry, lenders - that give you encrypted DRM crippled data and a revokable license to decrypt it. If you're giving those people money, be prepared to do so for the rest of your life.
But EMusic... well, people are going to leave there pretty fast, which is going to accelerate the price squeeze. You don't want to be their last customer, because he's really going to catch it in the shorts.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html# Piracy
Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as ``piracy.'' In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them.
If you don't believe that illegal copying is just like kidnaping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word ``piracy'' to describe it. Neutral terms such as ``prohibited copying'' or ``unauthorized copying'' are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as ``sharing information with your neighbor.''
Sorry! I had to be that guy.
"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!
It took me two minutes to find the credit card I signed up with and cancel it. I have wanted to cancel since they changed to that shitty download manager that does not let you queue more than 40 mp3s. I was never a huge downloader but I liked the fact that I could queue up 10 albums once every two months and listen to them. They totally screwed my user experience with that stupid limitation. So, yes, I am very sad to stop being their customer since I learnt of artists there was no way I could find out about but there is NO WAY this price structure is realistic.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
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.
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.
Emusic had Lame-encoded VBR MP3s after a major upgrade some months ago. Cannot really imagine any better quality than this...
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
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
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.
$10 may not seem like much to you, but it's a lot to a working family. ...you insensitive clod!
Magnatune (which I found from Slashdot) allows you to try everything before you buy.
http://www.magnatune.com/
plus-good, double-plus-good