Big changes to eMusic-- and not to my liking!

Ever since I returned to the world of music geekery, my favorite source of legitimate music downloads has been eMusic.com. I've been a member since mid-2005. The site was a treasure trove of amazing music from independent labels and provided wonderful music discovery services through extensive editorial reviews. It was also significantly cheaper than iTunes or Amazon, with tracks costing between $0.30 and $0.60 per track, depending on the level of your subscription plan. I had been an enthusiastic evangelist for this service, recommending it to all of my musically-inclined friends whose tastes ran against the mainstream.

They opened their doors to the Sony back-catalog (i.e. anything older than 24 months) in June 2009. That added about 200,000 tracks to their catalog, but also brought some changes to their price structure that increased subscription fees and upped the per-track costs for most users. While I grumbled a bit, as I thought that this was turning their spotlight away from the independent labels that made the site so wonderful, I thought it was still a better deal than the competition, and was still a great source for indie labels. I thought it might also attract some users interested in major label artists that would then be exposed to more indie acts.

eMusic made another big change in late November of this year, and I am much less impressed with things now. They added about 300,000 tracks from Universal music, but that deal required variable pricing, so their old "X number of tracks per month" model had to go out the window. Users now have a dollar amount to spend on variably-priced tracks. Long-time users like myself have access to "preferred plans" that kick in a small bonus per month, but this new pricing plan still represents a significant price increase.

To make matters worse, several of the larger indie labels did not appreciate the changes to terms that Universal made to eMusic, and have pulled out of the partnership. Labels that have pulled out include Merge Records, Matador Records, Rough Trade Records, 4AD, XL Recordings, and Domino Records. These labels collectively removed about 10,000 tracks-- but 10,000 of the most popular, critically-acclaimed artists on the site.

I just filled out eMusic's "top 10 eMusic albums of 2010" form, and I found that 7 of my top 10 picks, including all of my top 5, are no longer listed on eMusic.

An additional kick in the teeth is that they no longer let subscribers re-download tracks that had been previously purchased.

So-- a whole lot less for more money. What a deal!

All-in-all, these changes have made eMusic a far less desirable service than it had been. I have just suspended my subscription for 60 days, in the hopes that some of these so-called improvements will be reversed.

If not, as much as I hate to say it, I will probably cancel my subscription.

As Joni Mitchell wrote, "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." They paved eMusic and put up an ersatz iTunes.