Emusic Relaunches - Cheap, DRM-Free Downloads

An anonymous reader writes "Emusic.com has relaunched today. This is important for several reasons. 1) They sell MP3s. No DRM. I can play them on my Linux box or wherever. 2) They are encoding at 192Kbit/s VBR. That's near CD quality (and how I rip my own CDs). They are focusing on lesser known independent music and providing some editorial content to separate the good from the bad. I see lots of great jazz, classical, and folk/country stuff in their library. 4) Subscription rate is 9.99/month for 40 tracks. That is $0.25 a track. Much cheaper than everywhere else. It's near my pricepoint. This is the first online music store that I will seriously consider. (And actually the first that I _can_ consider since I'm a linux user.)"

Comments

I am signing up...

[grasshoppa]

...if for no other reason than to encourage this kind of service.

I haven't even seen the catalog yet. :)

Slashvertisement

[suss]

Ummm yeah... submitted by an "Anonymous Reader", not by the owner of emusic at all, right? /wonders how much that cost.

Pricepoint?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is $0.25 a track. Much cheaper than everywhere else. It's near my pricepoint. This

First it was anything but $0.99/track is not cheap enough. Then $0.99 is not enough,.. Now people are not even willing to spend a whole quarter for a song? I think there are some people here who will still be complaining when they are free, just because they aren't encoded at a high enough bitrate!

Re:Pricepoint?

[Anonymous Coward]

About a year ago you could get unlimited downloads for $9.99 a month. Emusic stopped that when it was sold. I canceled my account the day they announced the move to 40 downloads a month.

You may think 40 downloads is a lot, but for the type of music available at Emusic, it isn't. Most people who posted in the forums at Emusic liked to try different artists and styles. That was easy to do with unlimited downloads. The majority of the music at Emusic is material most people aren't going to know, so being able to experiment was a big part of why customers stayed with them. It's hard to experiment with 40 tracks. I listen to that much music almost every day.

The problem with Emusic's change in service is that many posters on the forums said they would have paid $50 for an unlimited service. I certainly would have. It's their loss.

Re: Pricepoint?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said $0.99 was ever reasonable?

CD tracks were averaging $0.99 when the industry was telling Congress that it would get cheaper after the investment costs were written off!

The cost of online distribution is a fraction of what it once took, i.e. manufacturing, inventory, shipping, personnel, etc, and you are _still_ paying the same price for an inferior product!

This complaint isn't new...you just never listened to the original complaint we had!!!

Re:Pricepoint?

[Chris Burke]

I was an absolutely ecstatic Emusic subscriber, and I would plug them in just about every /. article on online music, DRM, etc. because they were awesome.

My standard model, which apparently was pretty common, was to download a single album from ten bands, burn it on a CD and listen to it at work for a week or two and decide what I liked. Then I'd get more of those bands, burn a CD for work, listen for several more weeks. Repeat a couple times, and I'd have enough new music to last me for several months. I wouldn't download much in that time, but I kept the subscription because when I wanted to experiment with some new bands, I could.

The new model, while still better than some of the other schemes kicking around including others suggested by Emusic, doesn't lend itself well to this experimental style.

It might still work, but the amount of experimentation would be more limited, and I'd have to wait a month to turn experimentation into aquiring more songs from the bands I liked. Eh, maybe I'll try it for a month or two.

You want cheap?

[justkarl]

How about Epitonic for free music downloads! Free, legal, and something that everyone will like.

Re:monthly/per track pricing?

[mOoZik]

Yes, that's the business model, it seems. At first glance, it seems like a perfect deal, until you realize that maybe you don't need 40 tracks a month, and maybe just one or two. But guess what? According to the Slashdot summary, you're still gonna get charged the $10 a month. This is for those heavy music buyers. I'll stick to iTunes, thank you very much.

Only on slashdot...

[TiggertheMad]

We whine and bitch endlessly for and end to stupid, pointless DMR schemes. We pine for non-propritary formats. We wail when downloads are expensive.

And we complain when someone tells where it is.

You guys rock!

Re:Want to see what they have?

[bubkus_jones]

Major label bands have their (outdated, some say) distribution model. Indie bands don't have as many resources, and have to work harder to get thier music out to anywhere outside their local touring area.

This provides a means of doing it that's 1) cheap for the consumer, 2) not giving it away, and 3) not trying to control the use of the file.

I wouldn't want to see big-name bands on systems like these, because they'd push out the lesser known/indie bands, and the major labels would probably force emusic to use DRM'd files, which would defeat one of the big pro's of this service.

Re:Want to see what they have?

[schnell]

here is what it will take for me to pay for music:
1) must host every song ever, available for immediate speedy download in more than a few different formats/bitrates
2) a query tool (genre, artist, date of release, lyrics, etc) at LEAST a simple search utility
3) when I select a song I want to see the list of "other people who selected this song also selected.."

thats it.. first site to implement these 3 features gets my money. I don't care what it costs.

iTMS has items #2 and #3. Every song ever? Come on, nobody has ever had that, nor would anyone want to. It wouldn't be worth the disk space to store or even the cost of electricity to rip the hundreds of thousands of old albums that will never, ever be purchased by anyone again. And nobody but geeks ask for multiple encoding rates ... the same Slashdot audience that whines about 99 cents being too much to pay for a song. Not exactly the target market businesses want to cater to.

I'm not suggesting that you personally are doing this ... but some people in the past have made deliberately unachievable "want" lists for online music distribution as a justification for pirating music. (And before you ask, yes, I have downloaded music that I don't own; I can rationalize it [not available except on vinyl and I don't have/want a record player] but I know that it doesn't make it right.)

I can say "I won't buy a satellite TV system until it has a.) 1000 channels and b.) costs less than $9.99/month." I can refuse to buy a DTV or Dish system because it doesn't meet my criteria. But it doesn't justify my going out and pirating satellite TV. The point is that you can sit on the sidelines of the legal downloading market for as long as you like, waiting for your wishlist of features, or you can use what's available to you now if it's good enough. Just don't use "it's not quite the way I want it" as an excuse for doing something wrong.

Again - not saying the parent poster is doing this. But just throwing out a little cosmic karma caution to those who may be doing it.

Re:Want to see what they have?

[hackstraw]

Why steal when you can buy cheaply?

Why pay anything when you can pay nothing?