Commentary

For those of you unfamiliar with the eMusic MP3 subscription service, here is how it worked up until about a month ago. Subscribers would pay a flat fee for a specific amount of downloads per month. My deal was initially 30 downloads for $11.99, until the company added on an extra ten when I renewed my contract about a year ago. So, 40 downloads for $11.99 – basically about three albums a month at about four buck a piece. I could deal with that. Plus, if I used up all my downloads and wanted to get some extra music, I could buy a booster pack at around five bucks for 10 extra downloads – not a bad deal at all.

Of course there were a couple of catches. The first was that your downloads didn’t roll over, so you always felt the need to use them all up by the end of the month to get your money’s worth. In a way I liked this inconvenience since it tended to push me to take a chance on artists I would otherwise skip over. Getting something, even if you would only listen to it once, was better than letting the downloads go to waste. Plus, if you stumbled on something you actually loved, well then you could only have the site to thank. eMusic has a great set-up for this as well, listing similar artists, influences, formal connections, and followers on the same page as every album download. So if you like Sonic Youth, maybe you’ll elect to take a gamble on one of their more obscure “followers,” such as the Kinski or Libraness.

The other drawback of eMusic, to many, was the fact that it dealt almost exclusively with bands on independent labels. You weren’t going to find the latest Britney Spears or Black Eyed Peas album, but if you were looking for the new Sunset Rubdown, Spoon, or Carl Newman release you were in luck. It certainly seemed to be the iTunes for the Pitchfork crowd.

But now the tables have suddenly turned. Last month my subscription fee stayed the same, but suddenly I was back down to only 30 downloads per month. This coincided with a sea of major label acts arriving on the site with their lucrative digital catalogs, and some new twists in the downloading structure as well. Suddenly, albums are listed as “Download 12 Credits” as opposed to just being the amount of tracks that album is comprised of. Of course this is fantastic news if you were about to download the 43 track Minutemen album Double Nickels on the Dime or the 40 song Superdrag compilation 4-Track Rock. Both are now available for just 12 credits each, as opposed to 43 and 40 respectively.

But what if you were just looking for one or two songs? This is where eMusic has stepped over into the realm of the uber-lame. All of a sudden certain tracks are listed as “album only.”

Say it ain’t so! For years I embraced eMusic as a worthy alternative to the evil iTunes, and to watch it slithering over to the Dark Side is akin to witnessing Anakin Skywalker slaughter the Younglings in Revenge of the Sith. eMusic’s greatest asset is that it was a flagship for independent music. I’m not gonna bitch endlessly about the sudden availability of all the great albums by the Clash, Cheap Trick, and Bruce Springsteen, but I will say that I would be happy to bypass those catalogs in order to have eMusic back the way it was. To me eMusic always seemed like the digital music store for the underdogs. It was the online equivalent of your local hole in the wall record shop. The place where you’d find bins overflowing with obscure punk CD’s and out of print LP’s. Visiting eMusic now seems a bit too much like browsing the racks at the local Best Buy or Wal-Mart. Maybe this new strategy will work well for bringing in the masses, but the fact that the masses where nowhere to be found is part of what made eMusic so special in the first place.

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