eMusic is adding music from the Sony back catalog to its already monstrous selection. Oh, and it’s also raising prices (cutting downloads, but it works out to the same thing) considerably for existing subscribers. The people are not pleased.
I’m not particularly interested in the music they’re adding, since I pretty already have everything I might want. Every time anyone raises the price on anything, people threaten to walk, and often do. That’s certainly happening here, but those of us who are most affected by this price (and catalog) increase are probably a fairly vocal minority.
I’ll be interested to see how this all shakes out. I’ve met some of the folks from eMusic, and they certainly seemed to have their hearts in the right place. I don’t know how many of them are still there (the CEO is definitely gone), but hopefully they’re really trying to do something cool, and not just kind of screwing over their existing customers, as it looks right now in the heat of the moment.
UPDATE A couple of responses from eMusic have appeared here and here. Assuming it’s true (it probably is), it’s actually kind of heartening to know that the super cheap (20 cents per track, even less) plans don’t indicate what’s getting paid out to artists. eMusic was apparently subsidizing those accounts for a while, and they can’t do it anymore.
These would suck any time, but today’s Easter, and these things suck:
A fire burned down 40 buildings at a Christian Center in Alton Bay, which is across (more or less) the big lake from where I grew up. No one was killed, fortunately. I have no connection to the religion or the center, but my heart still goes out to the people having to deal with this back in the great Granite State.
Amazon has started removing sales rankings on gay and lesbian materials for some reason, classifying the books as “adult”. Now, there’s every possibility that some of the books have some content that could be argued, but the lists of materials that I’ve seen include a lot of books that don’t have anything “adult” in them, while books like collections of Playboy centerfolds continue to appear in sales rankings and search. There’s a petition available, but really I’m hoping the shitstorm this has started in various places online (Twitter’s a good one) will be enough to cause Amazon to get their collective head back on straight (so to speak).
UPDATE: It apparently was a system glitch (no official statement yet that I know of). It had the unfortunate effect of looking like anti-gay bias, but it was not intentional. Good to hear. It’s still rather odd that a flag in their database could have caused this kind of thing, but at least it wasn’t what it appeared to be.
Josh Freese is a big-time drummer with lots of studio credits and whatnot. I’m not overly familiar with his work, but after seeing his rumored list of things you get when you buy different editions of his upcoming solo record, I am suddenly, instantly a fan. I hope the record’s good.
Louie Bellson was one of the all-time great drummers, and he passed away on Valentine’s Day. I never got to see him play; the closest I came was playing a gig with bass player who had played with him. We’ll miss you, Louie.
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