eMusic: The Final Nail

Tomorrow, my eMusic subscription renews for the month, giving me 37 credits that I may use to download music from the site. When the rollover happens tonight, I plan on using these credits and then immediately cancelling my subscription.

Nearly 7 years ago, I was sitting in my friend Scott’s apartment and we were talking about music (as we often did) and he told me about something called eMusic. This was an MP3 download site, but unlike iTunes it was less than $1 per track, there was no DRM, and it catered almost exclusively to independent labels. The next day I signed up. I think the first albums I downloaded must have been The Get Up Kids and Stephen Malkmus’ most recent offerings. For the next few years eMusic would be not only my primary method of acquiring new music, but also my primary method of discovering new music. Amy Kuney, Andrew Bird, Cinemechanica, Faraquet, The Mountain Goats, The Paper Chase, Tom Waits, and Unwound are all acts that I may never have discovered or listened to had there not been such easy access and promotion of their work through eMusic.

eMusic made it easy to take a chance on something new with a pricing plan that cut out the bloat of the middleman so often heaped on records by labels, distributors, and retailers. For $15 a month I got 65 tracks worth of music. Over time the 65 tracks became 50 as eMusic changed their pricing plans, an understandable move. I was still getting great music at a great price though and since I had moved from Boston to Virginia (where my options for physical media were diminished) I was still glad to have the service. When 50 tracks became 37, and certain albums began not to allow single track downloads, I took notice however.

Last June, eMusic formalized a deal with Sony to put their tracks in the library. Along with this deal came a change in the pricing plans. eMusic would say that the change had little to nothing to do with the new arrangement, however it was hard to divorce the two after the fact. The big 4 know how much they can get per track from iTunes and Amazon and while it may be tough to say who needed who more, it’s certain that deals and concessions were made. In the end eMusic got a much larger, much more mainstream friendly portfolio of music and longtime subscribers and supporters of independent music got fewer tracks per month and more restrictions on how to use them. Despite my anger at what I perceived as the “selling out” of eMusic, I remained a subscriber. In the end, not enough changed to make the new situation so unpalatable as not to continue. One thing was clear however, eMusic no longer cared about people like me. 

Most of the people in the world like the things that are presented to them, they see what they are given and they accept it, especially with proof that it is accepted by others.  The rest of us may do the same most of the time, but we’re also driven to find those things that aren’t being presented to us and to challenge ourselves to find and appreciate things that are new. eMusic used to seem to embody that principle and stood in my mind as an alternative to services like iTunes that got by giving people what they expected and what they knew would be accepted, instead of championing the more obscure, less generic, more targeted music often found on independent labels. When eMusic made their deal with Sony, later Warner Brothers, and now Universal, they made it clear that they had no intention of catering to the independents anymore. eMusic made the choice that so many have made before, they would rather make their money by selling easily digestible, unchallenging music to the masses than standing for up for art, diversity, and the general advancement of taste by continuing to support independent music uber alles.

eMusic has put the final nail in the coffin for me. While I can accept higher prices as a necessity, my loyalty toward eMusic as an ideal is gone. Their latest pricing change (seemingly made to satisfy the coming inclusion of Universal Music Group) will see eMusic move away from credits and toward a more mainstream monetary system, where the lowest amount any track will sell for shall be $0.49, effectively reducing my 37 guaranteed downloads a month to a possible maximum of 30. Add to this the fact that there will likely still be “album only” tracks that require an entire album’s download in order to acquire and “premium” tracks that will sell for up $0.79 and we’ve come a long way from the 65 tracks a month I enjoyed nearly 7 years ago. When all is said and done, there is virtually no difference between eMusic and iTunes now, except that on eMusic one gets a small discount for being a member. Given the choice between membership or not, I’d rather spend my $15 a month locally and support a brick and mortar independent record store. Sure they may have the same mainstream stock as the big box stores, but they also have what I’m looking for and at the very least I know I’m supporting the ideal of local business if not independent music.

My personal taste for independent music aside, what eMusic once represented was an easy, DRM-free, and inexpensive way to take a chance on something outside the constraints of the mainstream. There was a chance of getting people to try new things by making it a bargain and I know I’m not the only one whose music collection is the richer for it. With the mainstreaming not only of eMusic’s library, but also their business practices, that’s all but gone now and that to me is the real and lasting tragedy.