Sony Courts eMusic, Inspires Praise and Backlash

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eMusic is an online subscription-based store that has 400,000+ subscribers. eMusic differs from other well-known subscription music services (such as Napster and Rhapsody) in that the files available for download are in the MP3 format, making them fully compatible with all digital music players, and free from digital rights management software restriction. In the past, the biggest four record labels were uninterested in the service because it has no DRM, and a low price model. This lead eMusic to specialize in underground artists and non-mainstream music genres, including indie rock, pop, jazz, electronica, new age, underground rap, traditional music, classical music, hardcore punk, and experimental music, all on independent labels. However, times have changed, corporations have changed, and Sony is now on board with eMusic to publish all content except that which was released within the past two years. Artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and Bill Joel will now join the ranks of Vampire Weekend, Radiohead and TV on the Radio. Most eMusics MP3s, except audiobooks, are 192 kbps VBR.

However, customers are a bit irritated after Sony’s back catalog was added – subscription fees rose, were allowed less downloads, customers had to pay more per track, and the highest end Connoisseur package is much more than before. Customers are voicing their opinions very strongly in the company’s blog, with many stating that the company has no consideration for past subscribers, while others applaud the addition of such an enormous catalog. Here’s a good comment I found from Janine Allen:

Is there some way a subscriber could stick with their old plan and not have access to any of the Sony material? i.e. a cheaper (subscribers could stay with their current plan) “Indie” eMusic account vs. an account with access to all the Indie and the new Sony stuff based on the new pricing model? Each subscriber could pick what they want, and, to be fair, once you pick Sony, there is no going back (so you can’t collect all the Sony stuff and revert back.) Those who want access to the new catalog would pay a bit more to have access to it. Those who think eMusic is much cooler without Sony can continue to support the Indie labels they care about without a cost increase.

Otherwise, I’m really disappointed at the pricing model change. Where was there any consideration of your loyal subscribers? You didn’t even include us in any sort of discussion on this matter. I don’t think this is a step in the right direction.

I was looking forward to being a loyal subscriber for years to come, but now I’m seriously considering canceling my account.

..some of the comments are a little deeper, and little unusual to say the least:

As a lifetime insomniac, I have spent literally hundreds of nights reading up on artists that were available through eMusic, downloading albums, listening, analyzing, rating songs, recommending tracks to friends etc., all while my family slept soundly and thought that I was insane. This has been my favorite place online to burn through hours of my time without feeling guilty, or like I was being unproductive.

I have been mainlining music through eMusic for nine amazing years and I am sad to see that relationship change. eMusic has outlasted relationships, jobs, cars, apartments, laptops, and countless hard drives of ever increasing size. I have not decided whether to keep my membership yet, but I won’t let the unfortunate changes affect all the great music I have downloaded and the time I have enjoyed on the site. I just feel betrayed by what I perceive as an enormous amount of greed, and a wildly inappropriate price increase.

..many other comments state very harshly that they are quitting the service. Let’s check out the price breakdown:

  • The lowest-priced Basic subscription ($11.99/mo) now offers only 24 tracks per month (50 cents per track) instead of 30 (40 cents per track). Existing customers will be grandfathered into the old 30-song allotment, according to an eMusic spokesperson cited by the Los Angeles Times.
  • The mid-tier Plus subscription goes from $14.99 to $15.89 per month and offers only 35 tracks (45 cents per track) instead of 50 (30 cents per track).
  • The high-end Premium subscription goes from $19.99 to $20.79 per month and offers only 50 tracks (42 cents per track) instead of 75 (27 cents per track).
  • The Connoisseur package is going up in price, from $25 to $31, and for that your getting 25 fewer songs per month than before. That still factors to 41 cents per song.

Any eMusic subscribers care to share their thoughts? I will offer a quick thought – I think it is very sad that not only eMusic, but Sony will probably end up looking bad in consumers eyes for this price increase, turning off people to the company and its products.

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11
Jun 2009
POSTED BY Christopher MacManus
POSTED IN

Corporate

DISCUSSION 21 Comments
  • http://twitter.com/koolpaw koolpaw

    emusic will be dead with a major label “sony”?

  • gary

    I may cancel. I did not join emusic for major label stuff. For now I will suspend my account until I figure out what to do.

  • saywhattothat

    This should open up the door to another digital download site to provide the services of old eMusic, without the big labels..

  • moelle

    As a formerly avid eMusic fan and member since early 2002, here are the issues as I and many others see them:

    1. The price change is far more drastic for some of us than what you outline above. I have a “grandfathered” connoisseur package that, for some time now, has been $25 for 100 downloads. Next month, I am moved to $20 for 50 downloads. This is a 163% price increase. Unacceptable.

    2. We were not notified personally of our new rates. We have to log in to the site find this news out. Some of us wonder about the legality of not personally informing subscribers of their price change, at least in some states (I am not an attorney).

    3. What's worse, this kind of price hike is really, really sneaky. Consider the person who doesn't visit the site regularly… they get their credit card statement and see that their subscription fee has *dropped*. What they don't realize is that their download allotment also has dropped… drastically and disproportionately.

    4. In 2006, eMusic sent us an email (personally, unlike this time) where our price plans were GUARANTEED in writing indefinitely as long as we kept our accounts in good standing. This is evidently now null and void?

    4. We don't WANT the Sony catalog (no offense). Let alone the fact that it's only the Sony *back* catalog, titles 2 years old or older. We're there for the Indie music. We're the ones who don't buy stuff from your label. We don't see any added value in this deal. We can purchase back titles in clearance bins for less than the price of this rate hike. And we're resentful that we weren't polled, because many of us have been with eMusic for nearly a decade and made our listening habits abundantly clear… many of us proselytized for eMusic over the years. That's over. We're also just a little wary of now downloading DRM-free (?) tracks from a label who had a bit of a snag a few years back, installing malware on computers when people tried duplicating their CDs!

    5. Emusic members outside of the US have also been switched over to these new rates, but do not get the Sony catalog. They get nothing for their rate hike.

    6. Any business who cares about their customers' preferences (and continued business) will get a pulse on their customer base to see what they want. None of us knew anything about this until the deal was done. And we don't want this deal.

    7. If eMusic wants the indie labels to thrive as well, I personally don't think this is going to make that happen. Indies are, right now, reaping high volume downloads at eMusic. That will probably cease as longtime eMusic subscribers leave and new subscribers, ostensibly eager to find Sony back catalog titles (not current titles!!) at “half price” what they would be at iTunes. Who's going to surf the depths of eMusic and take chances on indies now that our downloads have been cut in half?

    8. Worst of all, despite receiving thousands of complaints on their public forum and blog, eMusic management has been upsettingly silent. And has been accused of filtering and removing particular posts.

    In a time where so many of us have had to make sacrifices to put food on our table (I myself am without a job), eMusic has effectively taken away yet one more passion… for some of us, it is the last passion we were able to indulge ourselves in these very, very trying times. I too am leaving eMusic. There ARE alternatives.

  • http://twitter.com/sonyinsider sonyinsider

    I really appreciate that you took the time to comment with a detailed perspective. I can clearly see that eMusic has made a major error and will lose its core customers, like you, who used the service as a way to discover new independent music. It's truly absurd that they didn't bring the community into this decision, and will probably suffer as a result of such.

  • http://twitter.com/sonyinsider sonyinsider

    What other services are you looking at?

  • moelle

    Thanks for listening in such open minded fashion. This is probably very trying for all of you.

    I do want to add that we all recognize the need to pay artists fairly. We'd have fully supported gradual rate increases to help independent musicians thrive. It's not our fault that eMusic wasn't raising their rates gradually, yet we're the ones who suffer.

    Emusic subscribers received the rate hike concurrently with the addition of the Sony back catalog, and it left a bad taste in our mouths. I would suspect that the independent artists need our money far more than (top selling artist here).

    Thank you again for listening.

  • Brian Cullman

    I think the situation has been poorly handled. I understand eMusic needing to raise their rates a little. And I can see the advantage to having Sony's archives available. But bundling the two announcements makes it seem as if the price increase is based on the new relationship with Sony, which may be true. If so, Sony will get the blame and be made out as the villain by eMusic afficianados. Further, the letter written to eMusic users was deeply patronizing, offensive to long-time subscribers and seemed to trumpet the pleasures of Sony's recent (but not TOO recent) catalog, assuming that what subscribers had been waiting for was a chance to complete their Billy Joel or Areosmith collection. Had some attention been paid to Sony's vast array of treasures, from Sly & The Family Stone, Baba Olatunji, Tim Hardin and Oscar Brown, Jr to Harry Partch, John Cage, Thelonious Monk and Eubie Blake, there might have been an opportunity to present the merger (for such is what it feels like) as one based on music and history as opposed to commerce. There is nothing wrong with commerce, but there is also nothing wrong with treating longstanding customers as valuable, as partners and as informed and intelligent consumers. While the comments from eMusic stress that the new prices are still marginally lower than those found on iTunes or Amazon, that fact ignores the way that many of us use eMusic: as a place to indulge in impulse purchases, to sample unusual, unknown or little heard artists, to see what's being recorded and what's being released in various parts of the world. I go to iTunes to buy a specific track or album. I go to eMusic to be startled by the diversity of what's available and to surprise myself. Higher prices will simply make impulse buying less likely and less attractive.

  • Ryan

    If this was a deal with Sub Pop, I would probably be in favor of it (even with the change in pricing). I could really care less how much of Sony's old catalog I can download. I will likely cancel my subscription.

  • Frank_Lynch

    I had been using eMusic to experiment with new artists I otherwise wouldn't have listened to, as well as round out catalogs for artists. (In the latter case, I already had a dozen CD's from Sun Ra, and eMusic's catalog of his stuff was extensive.) I certainly reap no benefit from having access to old Sony stuff: I have all of Miles Davis's catalog, Mingus's, Brubeck's, Ellington's. I have all the Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen I'd want except for what might come out new, but that material won't be on eMusic until after its two years in the penalty box.

    At first, I thought of staying with eMusic and figured I'd download twice as much at the doubled price. But then I realized it's not a linear function: the new price is higher than my marginal price point for experimentation or rounding out catalogs. So instead of half as much, it's zero: each download is more than I will pay for music of this nature.

    I downloaded my 75 tunes for June immediately, and left.

  • Frank_Lynch

    I should also say: if eMusic had considered 'experimentation' as a purchase process I would have stayed. On my first downloaded CD of Calexico, I was experimenting, and the 24 cents or whatever could have been fashioned as a “promo price.” If they wanted to charge me 40 cents for every subsequent CD of Calexico (or whomever) that would have been fine. On my second or third CD of an artist I was no longer experimenting.

  • Frank_Lynch

    that should have been “half as much at the doubled price” if it weren't apparent

  • Frank_Lynch

    They did do a survey, but I can't remember much of the content. I know I aborted it midway, because as someone who works in marketing research I was overly critical of the survey's questions and structure.

  • http://www.mp3toys.net/ Robert

    I don't think that the eMusic managers are so stupid as not to know that the latest move will alienate many existing subscribers. I think it is a move out of desperation/frustration from the eMusic investors.

    The problem for eMusic is, that it is stuck in it's niche. After offering completely legal DRM free MP3 files for 10+ years for the lowest prices by far, having only 400.000+ subscribers must be a big disappointment for the investors.

    eMusic also laid off staff recently and lost Indie labels like 'DragCity' (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Smog, …) due to their low royalties. Therefore, some kind of price hike certainly had to come anyway driving more people into the hands of P2P & Co.

    But instead of a moderate price increase, they did choose to go for 'All or nothing' by acquiring the rights to the Sony catalogue and raising their prices a lot in the hope of acquiring more mainstream customers in order to grow.

    The whole move is obviously a gamble. I think the heads of eMusic are just tired and probably say 'either we manage to break out of our Indie hole' or we die and it's finally over.

    Also the way the whole move was communicated with all the half-truths and held-back information also shows for me that they are exhausted and probably don't care too much anymore.

  • moelle

    Oh, they did? Thanks for sharing that. When did they do that? You have my curiosity piqued about what they must have asked now!

  • Frank_Lynch

    I remember it being pretty basic, kind of “what can we do to make you happier.” I definitely DON'T remember trade-off questions which would have assessed preferences to assist in restructuring the program. With my background those would have been memorable.

  • http://myfaceinyourspace.blogspot.com/ Jackdaw

    I gotta say that an increase from 22.2¢ per download to damn close to 40¢ per download is a very steep price increase. I understand eMusic has to be a viable business etc. but I'll bet that at most I'll want about 3 tracks a year from the newly available labels.

    Truth is, for years those labels have ignored my musical interests. Why should I now be expected to pay a whole lot more so that their releases can be available on eMusic? It's not like you can't find their releases in many other places, real world and online. Why should I support their desires to fatten their bottom line on recordings that they've mostly made their investment back on many times over.

    I valued eMusic for the opportunity to check out, at very low cost, a lot of new recordings that generally are hard to find in the physical world. I really don't give a fuck about being able to download The Clash or Sex Pistols via eMusic. They're hardly what I'd call cutting edge music any longer. No one who's opinion I respect would think that they were significant today in any way other than historical. Much as I like the music, they've become basically little more than consumerist fodder for those who haven't kept up with the times.

    I think that this new strategy is kissing the asses of the fat shits that are only concerned about money, not music; the same fat shits who damn near wrecked their business through their unfettered greed. It's a serious stumble for eMusic in my opinion.

    Obviously, the value I derived from the low-cost ability to audition a lot of music has now been chucked out the window. I can only hope that sufficient attention continues to be paid to the wide range of music that does interest me; the music made by musicians for those involved with music, not just product. If the availability or profile of worthwhile music is diminished with this change it will truly be a sad day for eMusic.

  • Jason

    Moelle summed up exactly what I have been thinking the past few days. I am (was) a 6 year customer that has spent over $1600.00 at emusic because I believed in what they were doing.

    I remember the survey too, and I also remember specifically stating that the sole reason I was an emusic subscriber was because they avoided the RIAA. Now that Sony's on board, I will be looking elsewhere for my music.

    If you have the disposable income, I suggest buying music directly from a band's website and letting emusic, the band and the label know the reason you are doing so. Ask the band and labels to focus on more responsible websites and services that avoid the RIAA altogether.

    If you remain a subscriber to emusic, I strongly suggest you take advantage of the “rate-it” option, but remember that as a consumer, the vote that really counts is the one you make with your wallet.

  • laserdanger

    Emusic could do a whole lot to help its credibility if they showed figures indicating that the indies labels were in fact getting their fair share.

    But at this point i really don't think they care much for their old customer base. the changes have gone underway and the pricing of the music seems to favor those who are not particularly music savvy. for example making it harder to sample music by buying single tracks. at the new pricing it pushes users to put their alloted downloads towards an entire album. I am sure this is another fail safe put in place by sony so that users simply don't go in and raid only the best tracks.

    time will tell if this new strategy will pay off.
    most likely it will not.

    The new demographic Emusic seeks does not want to spend money on dated music. Not only that but this new demographic doesn't want to spend money on a subscription service. I believe that this type of listener is much more of a impulsive buyer. Do they no see that this exact demographic is the one that inflates p2p sites, while emusic's old customer base were the ones paying, month after month, on time and in full. It seems like a poorly thought out plan, masterminded by sony in an attempt to sink the subscription model.

    I will not claim to be a super music snob. Although I was on the connoisseur plan and always used up my downloads. I do enjoy Dylan, Cash, Elvis, lou reed, etc. I believe I am not alone in saying I look forward to downloading these artists. But at these prices I cannot afford to experiment. I will leave once i fill in most of the cracks of the above artists. should not take long since I already have many of their CDs. 3 or 4 months perhaps tops. than I am gone.

    bye, bye Emusic.

  • dusty14

    I am happy that e-music has finally come up with an album-based pricing plan (1 album = 12 tracks) that doesn't penalize musicians who record long tracks or consumers who favor albums with many short ones. I am also happy if the price increase means higher royalties to independent musicians. But the implementation was sneaky and full of double-speak. E-music emphasizes the catalog expansion and improved ability to download albums with more than 12 tracks, without mentioning the flip-side, which includes an enormous price increase, the unavailability of key tracks on many albums without a full album download, and a greatly increased cost for albums with few tracks. It is also unclear whether the increased revenues will be shared with the independent labels, or are going mostly to Sony. Also, the price change is far from small for those of us with “grandfather” plans. I am not cancelling my subscription yet, but with prices effectively more than doubling for my plan, I'll be considering it once I use my bonus-pack consolation downloads. I don't blame Sony for any of this. In fact, I am glad to see them finally releasing digital music without DRM, which annoys the consumer for the sake of making the track a little more difficult to copy.

  • dusty14

    I am happy that e-music has finally come up with an album-based pricing plan (1 album = 12 tracks) that doesn't penalize musicians who record long tracks or consumers who favor albums with many short ones. I am also happy if the price increase means higher royalties to independent musicians. But the implementation was sneaky and full of double-speak. E-music emphasizes the catalog expansion and improved ability to download albums with more than 12 tracks, without mentioning the flip-side, which includes an enormous price increase, the unavailability of key tracks on many albums without a full album download, and a greatly increased cost for albums with few tracks. It is also unclear whether the increased revenues will be shared with the independent labels, or are going mostly to Sony. Also, the price change is far from small for those of us with “grandfather” plans. I am not cancelling my subscription yet, but with prices effectively more than doubling for my plan, I'll be considering it once I use my bonus-pack consolation downloads. I don't blame Sony for any of this. In fact, I am glad to see them finally releasing digital music without DRM, which annoys the consumer for the sake of making the track a little more difficult to copy.