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.