exec summ: eMusic raised my rates and I’m not outraged. what the hell is wrong with me?
as I was saying, eMusic apparently raised their rates this month. not really raised I guess as much as you don’t get as much as you used to for the money. kinda like the ice cream industry’s quest to make us believe a half gallon is really the size of a quart. bastards. anyway, eMusic announced some deal with sony that will expand a catalog that has been a bit spotty at times by a gazillion titles. hurray, I say. eMusic has been rocking my world for a long while. I have enjoyed their recommendations, heard myself some fine music.
so I’m not that mad. but it appears others are, including former manager Dave Allen, who maintains that the service has signed its own death warrant with the recent changes. he mentions it again in a separate post where he refers to the eMusic “fiasco.” and I thought my ex was bitter. so I posted this comment on his post:
I have been an eMusic subscriber for what seems like a million years. my initial subscription was for, I think, 30 songs a month for $10 or so. I remember being surprised and pleased when I noticed that suddenly, I had 50 songs free each month. what was a good deal was even better – but the value for me was less in how much I got and more in what I got.
I had not made my periodic visit to the eMusic site this month to figure out what cool new music the service was going to open my ears to. I learned that I was only going to get 35 songs a month. ok, still 5 more than I started with. I also learned that I would have access to a much broader catalog of music and that I could start downloading whole albums without having to skip the 1 minute songs (hello sufjan stevens) as “not worth” the price. but for the record (not the the one that mp3’s were before they were cd’s), let’s break it down. I was paying around $0.33 per track. it then went down to $0.20/track. going forward, I’l be back at around $0.34 per song, but I’ll have a lot more songs to choose from. I just hope I don’t get all mainstream while I’m waiting for crooked still to put out a new album.
fiasco? I’m holding off on making that call until I see a follow up in 3-6 months regarding the effect on eMusic’s subscriber base, revenues, and profits. and let’s look at domino’s while we’re at it (dave calls that a fiasco, too). there’s a line in “burn notice” where a character derides spies as “bitchy little girls.” I could say the same about music fans who want the $1 apps to continue long after happy hour’s over.
according to dave, who in addition to having been in a seriously cool band serves as community manager for nemo design, the problem in both domino’s and eMusic’s cases was the absence of a someone like him on staff. I for one question whether having someone watch youtube live would have gotten the big d to react any faster. and I’m not sure it takes a dedicated staff person to know you’re going to take some heat for rasing prices. I still think eMusic is a hell of a deal and that dominos pizza isn’t that great even without bodily secretions.