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

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: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?

[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.