Journal Entry

:: Letter to eMusic ::

eMusic members got an email this morning about an upcoming price change. Right now, I’m paying ten bucks a month in exchange for 40 tracks. As of November 21, they’re decreasing the number of tracks to 30 for new customers, or existing customers who sign back up after a lapse in membership (I’ve done this before on purpose).

There has been some hue and cry over this, as one might expect, since it is effectively a price increase. The email gave no information about why they’re doing it, just inviting existing members to upgrade now if they were thinking of doing so, to get more music than they’ll be able to after the price change. I’m not overly bothered by it yet, because the most you’ll pay under the new pricing model is about 33 cents a track (if you download all of the ones you can — there’s no rollover), which is still a very good price for most things.

Still, without no explanation, I wanted to find out more, so I wrote them a letter through the [general feedback page][1]. They have a popup menu there for the type of feedback. The choices, amusingly, are “Good Feedback”, “Bad Feedback”, and “Other Feedback”. I don’t know what the hell kind of choice that is (would anyone describe their own feedback as bad? Does eMusic immediately file away feedback of one kind or the other based on the category?), but I chose Other. I wanted to post the whole thing here — if you have any thoughts on this, I’m interested to hear.

I got my email about the price change for new customers. I don’t know how much feedback you’re getting about this, but I do want to ask why it’s happening.

I’ve been with eMusic since the unlimited download days, and I think the switch to X downloads per month, although it meant I couldn’t download every damn thing I see right away, was a good thing. You boosted the quality of the MP3s a lot (from 128kbps CBR to whatever much higher VBR settings you’re now using), and your collection has gotten consistently better — the collections from Thrill Jockey, Bloodshot, Ninja Tune, Concord, Riverside/OJC/Fantasy, and CDBaby (to name a few) have bought in a lot of great music. The licensed All Music Guide reviews are also really useful, saving me a trip over to their site.

Anyway, I’m generally very happy with the offerings here, and as I understand it, you’ve been doing reasonably well. You’re the top music download site after iTunes, doing a lot of business. So the decrease in downloads per month comes as a surprise. I would think that with more subscribers you’d be getting more clout and be able to cut better deals that would benefit your customers. What has changed? You’re effectively charging a little bit more per download; are artists getting a little bit better cut now? I hope so.

Along with these questions, I have a suggestion: let customers accumulate unused downloads. Right now, when a month is up, any unused downloads are removed. This hasn’t affected me because I’m a somewhat compulsive consumer of music, being a musician myself; there’s always more than enough for me to download. I do think, however, that implementing download rollover would be a good idea. If, for some reason, I can’t or don’t want to download anything this month, it seems silly, given that I’ve paid for the right to download 40 tracks, that I just lose them if I don’t do anything about it that month. I paid the money, I should be able to download the music whenever — if there’s a compelling reason why that shouldn’t be, I can’t think of it. There have been a couple times when I let my membership lapse specifically because I just didn’t want to download anything else, but if I kept my membership active while I didn’t want to download, I’d just be spending money without getting any music. If you had rollover, I could keep paying my subscription fee (or pay a year up front) and not worry about it, just make up for it later.

I’ve recommended eMusic to many friends because I think your excellent catalog, fair prices, and DRM-free downloads are a great way to buy music. Indeed, almost all the music I’ve bought for the past couple of years, I’ve bought from eMusic. In general, you seem to be among the most consumer-friendly online music services; this price change seems anti-consumer without any further information. Please let me, and preferably the rest of your customers, know why this is happening.