So I've written about eMusic twice before (1, 2) and I suspect this will be the last time. My current annual subscription comes up in March and my strong inclination at the moment is that I won't renew it, ending a four year experiment.
From a straight financial perspective I think that eMusic is probably technically still a reasonably good deal - provided you feel like you would actually want to spend whatever the statutory requirement of your contract dictates in their store anyway, doing so month in month out is likely going to give you more music for your dollar than spending the same at Amazon, iTunes and the like.
But. The shifts made in the most recent transition have appreciably cut into the savings for the customer shopping at eMusic. They have also transparently paved the way for chipping at the bargain factor of eMusic purchases in an incremental and confusing way. In a nutshell the new order at eMusic simply requires me to think too much about whether and how I buy music - and for that deal, you don't get to demand that I pay in advance.
Good things first, they expanded the catalog again, they've got most everything now, this has been the sugar they've been pushing with the medicine of costlier music all along. There are some new customer service areas, look at this bargain on headphones and buy your concert ticket here and download the free track of the day you will never listen to again. I've perused it all a couple of times and it made basically no impact on me. But I didn't actually hate it or anything.
Downsides: a substantial cost increase. It's hard to say exactly how substantial, which is part of the problem. The credit system of pricing has been eliminated: everything is priced on a cash basis now. With this shift has come variable track pricing (very generally, the standard price is .49 per track, but popular tracks often price out at .79). Album prices are frequently completely disconnected from the per-track price and they're all over the map.
Against this I'm getting a $5 monthly bonus for some reason - maybe because I'm an annual subscriber? Maybe as some sort of retention bonus? Various other small retention bonuses, rewards for reviewing tracks have cropped up. You begin to see the problem? I would get into some serious tracking and math to figure out just what sort of deal I'm getting. And I've got a feeling this is just exactly the point. The version of eMusic I started out with was straightforward: tracks cost me 24-25 cents. Every change since - album only pricing, 12 credit albums (pretty much, exceptions may apply etc.), the shift to cash basis and variable track pricing - has made it all but impossible to figure out what I'm actually paying for music.
And this doesn't work out so great for eMusic because it makes me give the various deals, bonuses, and such forth a pass and just look at most obvious comparisons, which is that I went roughly from 24 to 36 to 49 cents or more a track, all in the course of less than 2 years.
The prices have crawled into the range of the other download stores now. I feel like I have to shop around whenever I buy an album. Beastie Boys License to Ill, $7.27 on eMusic, $7.99 on Amazon. Sting's Nothing Like the Sun $5.88 at eMusic, $9.49 at Amazon. Talking Heads Remain in Light $4.52 on sale at eMusic, 7.92 at Amazon.
Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, $8.99 at eMusic, $4.99 at Amazon.
Barely a deal, a couple of decent deals (but unlikely to dip below a 40% discount it seems), a terrible deal.
Further, eMusic has finally broken the ground to basically change the deal with their customers without further notice. Bump more tracks up to 79 cents. Eliminate full album deals, change the price to the added up track price. Add more track prices between the high and low end. Add a higher high end. I don't want to have to pay this much attention.
What this stands alongside are the things that have always been a straightforward downside to the eMusic deal: the subscription requirement and the failure to roll over unused credit at the end of the month. Maybe it is purely psychological but the conversion to cash pricing has greatly reduced my tolerance for these conditions. My attitude has gone from viewing it as a subscription fee guaranteeing me access to a minimum monthly volume of music, to seeing it as a mandatory spending minimum I am required to pay in advance.
Where this leads me to is not entirely eMusic's fault but on the other hand I find it hard to believe my situation is particularly unique. It's 2011 and the American economy has been in the tank for basically ten years. Like everyone else in the heavily squeezed, rapidly vanishing middle class, I've got a weather eye constantly on the future and there is nothing non-essential that's not potentially on the chopping block. My iTunes catalog* has almost 25 straight days of audio in it, over 9,000** tracks. It's all legal: the combined CD collections of two adults plus ten years on the digital marketplace. I can't make much sense in this state of maintaining a mandatory monthly music budget. eMusic will definitely still make sense for many. I don't think it makes sense for me any longer.
*iTunes as my music management software, not the store, I'm sure less than 1% of my collection actually came from the iTunes store.
**Actually true and unintentional, still, LOL.
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