Well unless you have been under a rock and not paying attention there has been some wheeling and dealing going on behind the emusic scenes with Sony/BMG. Like gasoline the cost of your online music is "slightly" going up to give you better service. Whaaaaaaaaaat? You mean double right Emusic? Early this year iTunes started charging a premium for some artists (1.28) and slightly less for other. Emusic is raising prices on average of 100% as they bring on the Sony/BMG catalog for releases that are two years or older. Ok fine but do i really care about Stevie Ray Vaughan at this point? Gimme Anti Records or nonesuch releases. If this is part of that plan. cool. If not it sucks.
To put it in perspective. My previous music download subscription account afforded me 65 downloads a month for $14.99 us dollars. Basically 23cents per track. The new plan I'm being forced to subscribe too is the same monthly fee for 37 tracks which is roughly 40.5 cents a track. Which is just about double what I was paying or 100% more!! I think gas prices are somehow related but we have not been able to figure out the connection yet. For albums with 12 or more tracks they are going to offer on select releases only a flat cost of just 12 download credits. The albums that already have this is limited so would be a good move by indies to think Nice Price but time will tell since all of your basic customer service plans details have not been released in full yet. You know I would have been fine with a slight increase but this is pretty harsh just so i can get me some Alicia keys. C'om on! Why not have those pop artists make better music or phase them out entirely. emusic has had over 250 Million downloads since it's launch by mostly independent artists (Remember last year we enjoyed the rolling stones on emusic for a spell).
Basically now you get 3 albums with of an avg 12 songs or more per album for 12 download credits, as opposed to 5.5 albums on old 65 luxurious download plan. Which is a 128% decrease in my subscription service. Bah hum-bug.
I'm also supposedly getting a +15 free booster track. Some legacy user with larger download plans (I imagine) will get a 25 booster pack. i wonder if this is every month or a one time thing? Because that would make it 52 tracks and 28cents a track which would be a fair rent 10% increase landlord. For those not grandfathered in the deal sucks or a least to begin with but still better than the lower 78 cent download price. I'll imagine it's a one time thing and will stick it out but the minute I start to notice the indies start to fall beneath promotion line I'll move on. I'm warning you emusic despite the single thread response the corp strategy has been to shoot the pooch first, watch them holler before responding. The internet is good like that.
Some of the Artists that are part of the Sony catalog will satisfy a lot of the alternative crowd who care about The Clash, Uncle Tupelo (sorry no wilco) and lou reed if you don't already own the damn cds!. For the older crowd you'll get Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke along with some classic rock Jefferson Airplane, Meat Loaf, Stevie Ray Vaughan, foo fighters, ben folds and some forgettable stuff as well, like kings of leon(my pov anyways), Rage against the machine. This of course is a partial list. Emusic is still the best deal out there for legal DRM free music.
2 comments:
I have loved my emusic subscription, but this sucks. You said it, SonyBMG is not worth a huge rate increase.
Someone is going to come along with a better Pandora that will allow you to create specific playlists and not listen to forced content--with some advertising solution--and it's going to kill emusic, which has been a good thing so far. But unless it can stay vastly more competitive in terms of price, its catalog shortcomings will become the liability that destroys it as the price point nudges closer to Amazon and iTunes.
More small labels and catalogs, more new music--that's the way to go.
And I knew I should have d/l'd the entire Stones catalog when it was available for a few weeks in 2007.
Yup, it's one of those things where the price point is still lower than other things out there but I'm still NOT going to up my account $5 to get be back to download level i was at. New emerging artists are going to suffer who have been enjoying a hey day from their self releases to Saddle Creek e.g. bands like Rural Alberta Advantage (1) Because I'm have to be tight wads these days because of the economy. (2) Somebody might just or already has ( i have to do my research) put a similar up sight up like you are saying subsidized with adverts, pay-o-la (however you spell that) and social network (3) The perception of big conglomerate is bad but who knows it will attract a whole new set of folks. Which is going to be the marketing drive obviously. Thus to my original point here obscuring the indies straight off the emusic charts. Damn. This will be interesting. If they are smart they will segregate the indies back to ghetto on the site creating a billboard type atmosphere. oh- boy what a mess.
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