Intrusive Contact

Why I (haven’t) canceled my eMusic subscription (yet)

crumbler:

Unfortunately, eMusic couldn’t leave well enough alone. Since it was founded in 1998, its various owners had courted the major labels in hopes of bringing mainstream pop, rock and country acts into their catalogs — and with them, hundreds of thousands of new subscribers. A couple years ago, some of the majors relented and joined the service — but for users there was a caveat. Namely, that my $15 now bought 13 fewer tracks a month. Instead of four albums-plus a month, I was now receiving about three. But there were many months when three new albums felt like enough, and so I stuck around.

If only they had stopped there, I might still be a subscriber. But in October the company announced that all the major labels were finally on board, and as a result music would now be priced not in credits but dollars and cents. The simple days of one-credit-per-song were gone. In their place was a system in which songs cost $0.89 or $0.99. Albums cost about the same as you would find on iTunes or Amazon MP3. Never before had I seen a company undermine its original value proposition so thoroughly.

I’ve been unable to bring myself to cancel my account, despite what I said earlier. Yeah, the pricing is not really a deal anymore, and the disappearance of many indie labels has pissed me off, but I still really believed in the editorial, because that’s really what drew me to there in the first place.

Outside of generous, better in the know friends than I, I’ve been pretty far out of the music scene since I stopped working at my college music station where every week I would have the option to go through at least a dozen CDs to find some gem that I could then put into rotation. I grew to depend on the recommendations they would put on the home page, largely because they wouldn’t write up the new Strokes album (which they recently promoted the hell out of), because they didn’t have it. Instead, they’d promote something they did have, which would often turn out to be wonderful, and something off of other people’s radar. They’re recommendation system also worked pretty well for me over the past five or six years I’ve been on the site.

However, now logging onto eMusic is less like an amazing scavenger hunt for some gem I didn’t even know I would love, it’s like looking through a “Where’s Waldo” book, I pretty know exactly what I’m looking for, and I’m not going to be surprised when I find it.