10.09.2003
farewell to emusic
Some months ago I signed up for emusic, a subscription-based online service. I agreed to pay ten dollars a month for a full year in order to get unlimited downloads from their large selection of high-quality mp3s. They've got album after album from mostly obscure artists, with the occasional somewhat well known act thrown in for good measure.
In the time that I've been a subscriber, I've gotten some stuff I hadn't had a chance to buy before, as well as a good bit of stuff I didn't know about and downloaded because of something I'd read or heard about it. From music I knew I liked including Tom Waits, Tim Buckley, Steeleye Span, Pentangle, Peter Murphy, The Soft Machine, Ty Tabor, and the Galactic Cowboys to things I'm so glad to have found by The Mountain Goats, Yo La Tengo, O Rang, Interpol, Eyes Adrift, and Boy Sets Fire, along with tons of others, some that pretty much missed their mark and some that have been pleasant surprises.
This service has been perfect for me and my constantly-hungry listening appetite. I rarely, if at all, listen to any one album frequently. This isn't because I don't enjoy music as much as ever; it's because I'm always looking to broaden the scope of what I know and enjoy. I never want what I'm listening to to be stale, or to wear grooves in my mind's ear. There are enough grooves there from playing favorite cassettes over and over when I was a kid on that bus ride to and from school, in my room, when I mowed lawns, when I went for a walk...
(Note: Every once in a while something will come along that leaves me little choice but to listen to it in that old way; a year or two ago I wrote about Days of the New's third album doing that to me. More recently there've been Chris Whitley's Hotel Vast Horizon, Peter Gabriel's Up, and some others. (None of those came from emusic.))
This morning I found an email from emusic which contained, along with all the usual gibberish, the following:
First, we are pleased to inform you that EMusic.com Inc. is being acquired by Dimensional Associates LLC ("Dimensional"), a private equity group focused on providing innovative online music distribution services. Dimensional shares EMusic's consumer focused philosophy of providing low cost, convenient access to great music. Dimensional plans to continue enhancing the EMusic service with new features and content and you can look forward to hearing more once the acquisition has been completed.
[...]
As an avid digital music fan, you are also aware that the music industry continues to suffer under intense financial, legal and technological pressure. As a provider of music downloads, EMusic is subject to a complex system of intellectual property rights and technological challenges that impose high costs and often uncertain risks on the company.
In order to respond to these ongoing challenges and maintain a compelling service for our valued customers, EMusic will be making a number of significant changes in the coming weeks and months. As part of these changes, we will be discontinuing the unlimited service plan and replacing it with a new service offering.
In actual fact, as an avid digital music fan I'm consistently baffled by what state the music industry constantly tries to tell me it's in, and at the reasons for that. I'm aware that the music industry wants me to think there's some big problem regarding how much money they're bringing in. I understand that the recording industry is stirring up a lot of legal pressures. I can grasp that the infrastructure for centrally hosting tens or hundreds of thousands of music files for instant access to a great number of subscribers is fairly expensive.
What emusic has done now, in backing out of the agreement with me that I pay 10 dollars a month for a year (I had to agree to a year of this, mind you,) is to begin offering the following options: I can stick around and, for ten dollars a month, get 40 downloads. For fifteen dollars a month I could get 65 downloads. Or (bonus!) as a current subscriber I can pay fifty dollars a month for 300 downloads.
Compared to those dollar-per-download services springing up all over the place, cost-per-track here is definitely better. But with emusic I have to get what they've got. It's very rare that I'll go after something in particular on there and find it. Selection-wise emusic's sort of like digging around in the CD stacks in the basement of some indie-minded music collector. A lot of stuff I'd like to get a sense of, maybe listen to for a while until I figure out what I really enjoy; but if I try to say something about, "I heard this song on the radio the other day," he'll cut me off before I get a chance to repeat a lyric and ask if he knows what it is. He'll look me with eyes that say, "What about ME makes you think I'd ever stoop so low as to buy anything you can hear on the radio?" (Hey, leave my metaphors alone.)
I'll concede, easily, that ten dollars a month for unlimited downloads is a bargain. I've had a good thing here, and I'm glad I've taken some advantage. I haven't used it like I should've though; the way emusic downloads work is just a little tricky. Their download manager allows a certain number of queued tracks; I think the number is 40. It won't queue stuff over that limit. The result of this is that I can't queue hundreds of tracks overnight while I sleep. I've gotta sit here monitoring, clearing downloads from the queue as they complete so I can add more songs. This is obviously restricting; especially for someone with my attention span. So while I've gotten a lot of music, I've not gotten as much as I'd planned when I signed up. I've still got a "stash" (basically a list of albums I'm interested in, saved as links through emusic's interface) that's pretty big. Today, then, I'm trying to go as far as I can, get as much of this stuff as I can.
So it was a bargain, but there's still a fundamental difference between the different ways that mp3 downloading or file sharing can be used. Free, or practically free, digital music is a boon for people like me. Not because we're too cheap to pay for music, but because we want to be able to hear as much music as possible. People who read books the way I want to listen to music have libraries (though I'm sure not everyone uses them.) While libraries have music, their selection (at least in any case I'm aware of) is terribly sparse. Not much chance of going in there looking to hear some particular album and finding it. Nobody's giving library loanees a hard time about the money they're not spending to buy those books. So now we've got technology to give people like me the ability to listen to anything, but it's being called illegal all over the place, and there's a campaign to demonize everyone who uses it. Services like emusic are businesses and apparently the industries not going to let them work, either. We've got to pay for every single mp3 we get. And come on, a dollar for an mp3 is ridiculous, really. That cost is obviously meant to land the cost of an album's worth of mp3s somewhere around the cost of a CD. Why not try this: I'll pay you 12 bucks for 12 downloaded mp3s if you send me the CD in the mail, too. These companies are trying to have us not notice that they're turning this into a huge advantage for themselves. An album's worth of mp3s grosses the same as a CD, but the company doesn't have to pay for packaging or shipping, and the customer gets lower quality audio fidelity. Wow! We're lucky these iTunes guys are around.
Needless to say I'm not going to continue on emusic after November 8th, when the switchover happens. I went to see what other subscribers would be saying on the emusic messageboard system, but unsurprisingly it's "temporarily unavailable." I also note that in a different email account I've just this morning received an add, courtesy of mp3.com, for emusic which includes the text: "Unlimited Burning: No confusing restrictions." I'm not sure how far a new recruit would get before seeing that the service is changing; I imagine someone in those shoes would be more frustrated than I am right now.
(taking me forever to get around to checking thru this. wonder if what i said is what i started off to say. right now, for the past hour or so, connectivity to the download servers there has been terrible; everyone must have gotten the same idea. probably just post this now sans editing. sue me.)
related?:
ThinDivide v3.65 is a free , ad-free file sharing program.
End the agony of CDs and MP3s suggests that the music industry revert to cassettes and vinyl so that file sharing is nipped in the bud. Starts off good, but when he starts saying shit about "I won't try to debunk the anti-file sharing movement. Their stance is obvious, and easily defended.[...] To defend free music sharing, on the other hand, requires a certain degree of rationalization," he pisses me off.
iTunes customer re-sells iTunes song - Though he tried to do this on ebay, ebay wouldn't let him. So he... did a whole bunch of stupid shit, apparently spent 30 bucks, part of which went to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and eventually this other person had the song.
