eMore eMusic

Well it's just been a big damn hullabaloo down at eMusic since I wrote about it yea, well over a year ago now. I spend way too much time on the damned internet, not to mention that I try to use all my eMusic credits each month, so you'd think I'd have been on top of the developments, but I wasn't. I only heard about it as a sort of sideline in another online discussion and had to go look it up when the change was practically on top of me.

In a nutshell eMusic added a major piece of the Sony catalog to their line-up, and restructured their pricing, and then a whole bunch of their customers totally lost their shit. To their discredit, eMusic managed to allow the whole thing to be framed as "Good news everyone - we're adding music from THE GREAT SATAN Sony which you are very excited about! By the way we're doubling your prices."

On the other hand, it has to be said that the dissenters were, on the whole, a lot of whiny little bitches.

I had it easy - I'm on the pay-a-year-in-advance pricing scheme (this is not a hard decision for me, I've got more than a year's worth of downloads in my fucking Saved for Later file as it is - on top of all the things I keep discovering I have to own right now - eMusic is basically my only music budget in these trying economic times we keep hearing about, so if you are a musician with something to sell and you aren't there you better be my good friend or it's basically tough shit, BUT ANYWAY) the point being my current contract under the old pricing schedule isn't up until mid-March, so I'm having a nice, long, and most importantly pre-paid opportunity to dig the ins and outs of eMusic's new pricing structure.

Yes, there is a price hike. It's not quite what some are making out, at least not at the sort of premium, year-in-advance level high rollers like myself are into. Under current pricing my credits (which are mostly equivalent to a single track download - so much more about that "mostly" in a moment) cost 24 cents each. Under the plan I'll convert to in March they'll cost 36 cents. The astute mathematician will note this is not in fact double, but rather half again the price, which in technical parlance is "not as bad." You will note also that it continues to be substantially less than iTunes or Amazon or pretty much anybody else. For worse value purchasing options the prices get up near 50 cents (setting aside the pay-as-you-go "booster packs" that can cost up to 60 cents a credit). With the recent addition of Warner Brothers catalog material the deal is all the sweeter for those of us who are not pure-Indie snobs.

Ah, but there are complications. Indeed: for no longer can one rely on the cost of an album being the cost of the number of tracks on that album. A substantial percentage of albums have adopted a uniform cost of 12 credits (for those following along with a calculator, this translates to around 4 to 6 dollars). Clearly this will be a bargain in some instances and a price hike in others, it all depends on how many songs are on the album. I imagine Jazz and Classical fans in particular will find the new setup uncongenial, for my own sake (and it's honestly not my intention to be some kind of big cheerleader for eMusic here) so far it has gone substantially in my favor. I've been getting better deals than ever.

But the album pricing introduces some weird new territory which is actually my whole purpose for writing this long consideration which will be read by none: for the most part you can still download album tracks a la carte from the albums, so what gives? Could you download tracks one at a time from an album with more than 12 tracks and pay more for the partial album than for the whole thing at once? I haven't actually tried it but as far as I can tell yes, you can. What about albums with less than 12 tracks? Well, there's where it gets interesting. Here you run into the other and entirely less positive (or even ambiguous) innovation in the new structure: "Album Only" tracks: tracks you can only get if you download the full album.

I imagine some albums are only available as full album downloads now, though I can't recall if I've seen that come up yet. The other (and in my experience, at least, more prevalent) example of the Album Only beast, which is, of course, the Hit Single. They are not identified as such, of course, but you don't exactly need a PhD to figure it out.

I wonder if the advent of this distinction is in fact an interesting insight into what has been rattling around in what passes for the mind of the Music Industry in their long and disastrous resistance of the digital download. It occurs to me that the industry must have something of a love-hate relationship with the Hit Single. One one hand, it is the indisputable Pitch King for their erstwhile product, the CD. The radio hit, the club favorite. But they hate to sell it alone, of course. They want you to buy the whole album. In this sense the original digital breakthroughs, the iTunes and Amazon deals, must have been bitter pills. No more would many pay 3 to 5 dollars for the venerable CD Single (a format that some, anyway, argue the industry had been trying to kill for years).

Hmm, 3 to 5 dollars, why does that sort of ballpark and spread seem familiar? A CD single can't cost substantially less than a full length CD to produce: likewise, a download of a track versus the download of an album is a matter of pennies. For that matter, in terms of production and promotion costs the difference between producing the hit and producing the rest of the album probably very quickly vanishes in the wash. The difference is all notional: the consumer is certainly not going to pay the same price for the single as for the album just because it costs the label about the same for them to have it.

It seems possible then that the real sticking point of the majors signing on with former Indie Star eMusic boiled down to that one issue: the minimum take for any particular production interpreted as transfer of the Hit Singles. 4 to 6 bucks, they're actually getting a bump.

HOWEVER, eMusic doesn't exist in a music vacuum and this creates some seriously odd situations for the canny consumer like myself.

Case Study One: Neil Young - Decade and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Decade. Classic Neil Young, from late 60s Buffalo Springfield through late 70s Stills Young Band. 35 tracks. eMusic Price: 12 credits. 12 Credits! Less than three bucks for me, if I grab it before March. Sixteen dollars from iTunes. Fifteen from Amazon. That there's a bargain. I'll be picking it up as soon as my credits refresh, tomorrow.

Decade contains many of the best songs from the solo album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere: Cinnamon Girl and Down By the River and what is apparently Young's inexplicable(to me) Hit Song, Cowgirl in the Sand (not that it's not a great song, it just seems odd hit material). Not a single Album Only track on Harvest or After the Gold Rush or Rust Never Sleeps. But Cowgirl in the Sand you have to buy the whole album to own. 12 credits for 7 tracks. It's an album worth owning, as some great stuff (not least the title track) is absent from Decade.

But the thing is, to reiterate, Cowgirl in the Sand is also on Decade. I had 6 leftover tracks, as it happened, tonight when I read about the Warner Brothers deal and went to see what kind of stuff was showing up. So I downloaded the 6 other tracks. Tomorrow, after I download Decade, I'll make a duplicate of Cowgirl in the Sand and change the metadata so that I can listen to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere in full without having to dick around. Strictly speaking, is this legal? Many will scoff that I even ask, but I think it's a legitimate question. Of course my bottom line answer is Warner Brothers can just come and get me if they think they can handle a piece of this. I'm pretty sure Neil Young would just laugh. And then again, I've already bought Cowgirl In the Sand, in one and another format, 2 times before in past incarnations. I may still have the LP somewhere: the tapes are long gone. Finally, I could have been more attentive and downloaded only the tracks that I wasn't going to get tomorrow, instead of everything but Cowgirl in the Sand. But come on. We're talking about a few quarters here, give or take. And I felt like listening to Cinnamon Girl right away.

Case Study Two: Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run.

The more conventional and irritating example. Great album, if you aren't too real to like Bruce Sprinsteen, as I am surely not. 8 tracks. 40 minutes, a short album. 12 credits. Grr, a rip job! The single Album Only track? Yeah, just guess. Okay, so now I'm quibbling over a buck or less, but you know, the principle. But here's the thing: Amazon didn't negotiate Album-Only tracks. I can buy Born to Run solo for $1.29. I think I'll go ahead and do that right now. That took less than a minute. Tomorrow when I've got credits at eMusic again I'll download the other 7 tracks on the album. Making my total cost 7 X $.24 + $1.29 or 2.97. Wait a minute! 12 X $.24 = $2.88! Damn it, I didn't do the math and now those bastards have screwed me for 9 cents!

I seriously considered erasing this case study out of embarrassment, but what the hell, you gotta stay real. Well played, Columbia Records, you imprint of Columbia/Epic Label Group, a property of Sony Music Entertainment! You win... This time...

I'm still finding the world of the legitimate digital music download on demand to be entertaining, anyway. If I had some money I'd tell you about who else is doing it. Perhaps another day.

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