Ack Phhht!

Has it already been a year since I signed up for eMusic?  Apparently so.  They gave me 25 free downloads to celebrate my anniversary last week, so I thought I’d write a little follow-up on how the service is working for me.

If I’d been writing this post back in April or May, the answer would have been simple, because eMusic has really served me well.  The website works pretty well in terms of enabling exploration and discovery, and I find that having a certain number of downloads each month tends to keep me looking for new things to buy (useful now that I’m married and don’t slip off to the CD store every weekend).  I do occasionally find myself burning through an entire month’s credit allotment on a whim (“I feel like disco this week!”) and then having no interest in that genre a week later.  But that used to happen at the CD store, too.

However, things have changed a lot since the start of summer, when eMusic announced that they had inked a deal with Sony, the first major label to agree to put their catalog on eMusic.  Along with this, they introduced album pricing and (sigh) a significant price increase.  Needless to say, this has been controversial — eMusic has spent years marketing themselves to fans of indie rock and other niche groups, and many of them are now grumbling about having to pay higher prices in return for selections from a major label that they’re not interested in.  I suspect eMusic has seen a fair amount of churn in their user base as a result.

My own feelings have been pretty mixed, and have see-sawed back and forth as more details came out.  The price increase — from around 25¢ to around 40¢ a track — was painful, not because 40¢ is a lot per se (it puts an average album between four and five dollars), but because it makes taking chances and downloading albums on a whim less appealing.  More annoying, the album pricing (topping out the price of some albums at 12 download credits, e.g. $4.80) — which was promoted as a straight win for the consumer — actually turned out to be a lot more complicated, because some songs could only be downloaded with the album, forcing you to use 12 credits to get some 8- or 9-track albums.

That said, I’ve largely made peace with the changes.  I wasn’t really interested in the Sony catalog at first — outside of Cheap Trick, I wasn’t really sure what I’d find worthwhile (I already have all the Clash albums, and I have no interest in the Byrds or Bruce Springsteen), but I’ve since discovered a lot of other good stuff — Mott the Hoople, the Only Ones, Sly & The Family Stone.  And I’ve been replacing a fair amount of proto-alternative-rock albums (Midnight Oil, Fishbone, Living Colour) that I had on CD back in the day but have long since sold off.

Anyway, I intend to stick with eMusic at least a while longer.  Even with the higher prices, it’s still a pretty good deal, if not quite the steal it used to be.

So, I’ve been using eMusic for about a month now.  As it’s turned out, I like it a lot.  Although my expectation was that I’d use it primarily to get stray cuts (singles, comps, EPs) by bands I already know, I’ve ended up doing a fair amount of random browsing, picking up a lot of music by bands I’d never heard of.  Which is what I really like about it — I’ve found some pretty good new music, and because I poke around and sample so randomly, the music I’ve downloaded has been pretty diverse.  Right now, the new music playlist on my MP3 player has shoegaze, britpop, indie rock, twee pop, Swedish indie pop, and power pop on it.  In the past it usually just had one or two genres in it, whatever I happened to be into the last time I went music shopping.

Their coverage is pretty good, too, to the point that I find myself getting unfairly annoyed when they don’t have some obscure indie recording that I’m interested in (for example, it’s pretty unfair to expect them to have the new EP by local band Shuteye Unison, which I was trying to find after I saw them open for Asobi Seksu last week).

So yeah, eMusic is pretty cool.