End Transmission

Today seems to have been a day of polarisation within the Emusic community with a mixed batch of news sneaking out.

1) Sony have decided to put their back catalogue of anything older than two years. Including Sony BMG, , Columbia, Epic, Jive, LaFace and Legacy Recordings. Probably a number of other sub-labels as well, hopefully American Records too.

It’s great to have so many important acts adding to the Emusic library; especially useful for new subscribers that don’t know about the small labels, or their offerings. The only problem I can see wit this is that it’s a US only addition, yet the rest of the world gets stung with the associated price increase for no additional benefit. All the articles that they are promising, linking together releases from Sony to similar material from indie labels mean nothing to us.

2) Some albums with more than 12 tracks are going to be offered as “full album downloads” that count as 12 tracks, even if they have 20+ tracks. Again, great news, especially when you consider lots of old Jazz/Blues stuff comes with very long track listings as they tend to contain multiple albums. Unfortunately there is currently no indication as to exactly which albums this covers. Is it every album with more than 12 tracks, or just some newer ones?

3) Price hike. It’s understandable that prices need to go up every now and then, it just happens that this one is very badly co-ordinated and very dramatic. The information form emusic says that it’s a slight price increase. Slight is probably the worst word they could have picked… depending on which package you are currently on it can be up to 115%! For example, my current package is 100 tracks for £19.99; this will change to 50 tracks for £17.99. The announcement says that the price increase has been timed to occur with the addition of Sony’s additions so people don’t feel too unhappy about the increase… Sadly this statement only makes sense if you are American as the price hike is global; access to Sony’s material is US only. I can’t help but think if the increase is due to Sony’s inclusion, then offer a separate subscription package that gives you access to Sony’s material as well; in a similar manner to their audio book section.

In theory I have no problems with a price increase as it’s a good service and it means more money for the small indie labels that I tend to download from. I am, however, rightly annoyed that I only found out about this from a third party. Emusic have failed to notify me that things are changing in any way. Some people, mostly US based, are receiving a note on their Emusic homepage about the changes, but this hasn’t turned up on mine yet. In addition, it seems they are refusing to honour people’s contracts where they have pre-paid for their X number of downloads a month, which seems highly unfair. Surely that’s the whole reason for people to pre-pay?

I can’t help but think it would have been nice to have some sort of email go out from Emusic to all it’s subscribers at least warning them that this was coming rather than radio silence. I’ve seen a lot of people threatening to leave; while I’m unhappy with such a dramatic increase for no additional gain, I will stick around for a while longer to see how thing go as it is still the cheapest online music store… though it will prompt me to be more careful when selecting what to buy and where from as old CDs are now cheaper to buy than a download; or even amazon’s MP3 store when they offer albums for £3 a shot.

We shall see how it goes…