More eMusic complaining

I never really did specifically blog about why eMusic has now gone down the toilet, and why I was canceling my account. I've been a member of eMusic for a few years. For $20/month, I was getting 90 MP3 downloads, from a catalog that was primarily punk and indie. The entire SST and Dischord catalogs were on there, and it was a great place to fill out discographries from favorite bands with one shot.

Eventually they retired my plan, and the best you could do as a new member was 75 downloads a month. They grandfathered previous members, however, so I kept my membership.

Last month, though, I logged on and got this message:

On your next account refresh Jul 22, 2009, your plan will change to the new eMusic Premium plan which gives you 50 downloads for $19.99 every 30 days.

We understand that the new price per download is a significant adjustment for some of you. The new pricing allows us to pay all our labels, and their artists, more and we hope will attract some of the great labels subscribers like you have been asking for. You can always choose a different plan by visiting the Plan Options page within Your Account.

So while I realize I was already ahead of the game with 90 downloads, it's a big freakin' hit to go from that to 50. You're cutting my service in half, but I'm paying the same? Why?

Well it turns out because after being indie stalwarts since the beginning, eMusic sold out, as it were. They finally signed a deal to distribute the Sony catalog, which means Arista, Columbia, Epic, and RCA. And in order to make the deal, the price per song that goes back to the labels had to go up. That's great for the labels (even for the indie labels who will make more under this deal), but the majority of people with eMusic memberships weren't on there to buy shit from Sony.

It's a tough call because had this price increase been pitched to me as something that needed to be done to benefit the indie labels I actually do want to support, I might have accepted it. But since it was driven by the deal with Sony and is adding a catalog full of mainstream shite that I would never buy, it's clear the site is changing into something I would likely not have joined in the first place. I'd have just paid a little more for something on iTunes, and bought a little less music.

This is my last month of 90 downloads, and sure enough the signs of the apocalypse are upon us. One thing eMusic does that I like is a section called the "eMusic dozen," where they pick 12 releases around a theme. This one, called Sonic Youth Side Projects, caught my eye. Except when I read the summary of Sonic Youth from author Kyle Anderson, it pretty much made my eyes bleed like they had been caught with a fishhook.

He continually refers to the band as "the Sonics," like it's some kind of cool shorthand, clearly collected all the "facts" about them from their Wikipedia page, and has a line in there about Northampton (where Gordon and Moore live now) that makes it sound like some kind of hippie commune. Did he think he was writing about Burlington? Has he ever been to either place?

Anderson is a former online editor at Spin who got fired in December, and wrote a widely panned book about grunge called the Accidental Revolution. If you want some entertainment, read the book reviews on Amazon at that link:

"This may be the worst book about popular music that I have ever read. Anderson's near total lack of knowledge about the Seattle musical environment of the late 1980s and early 1990s is stunning, and it is a wonder that any publisher would allow this drivel to see the light of day. It is very clear that little or no original research was done for the writing of "Accidental Revolution." 

Additionaly, the author utilizes the kind of smarmy, communications-major, writing style that many sanctimonious-yet-ignorant blabbermouths use to mask the fact that they do not have any insights. Sorry Anderson, cheesy "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" one-liners don't make you sound like an insider; they make you sound like a wannabe."

Amen. Preach it brother. They go on and on in the same vein, and describe exactly the same feeling I had about the Sonic Youth biography Anderson wrote.

If this is the new direction we can expect from eMusic, it's even worse than I thought. 90 downloads a month was a lot of music; more than I could really digest even on 20-30 hour training weeks riding alone with headphones. Generally I like to buy a new record a week. That was always my allowance when I really started pursuing music in junior high school, paying for my LPs and cassettes with paper route money. But that would add up to a quick $40/month on iTunes these days, and that feels like a lot. $20/month and 50 downloads on eMusic is still 4 albums, and allows me one/week at an affordable price, and I'm happy the indie labels will be getting more money, too. But I can't help feeling taken advantage of, and I know there are other options out there.

"The Sonics." Seriously?