I was once quite enamoured with this service, so what changed?

Well basically they changed their prices. And by that I mean they increased their prices. And by that I mean their prices went through the roof.

Up until this month you could download 75 tracks/month for US$20. Now, you’ll pay US$31 for those tracks.

Obviously this isn’t the first time that someone has hiked their prices by 50%, but that’s not really the point of this post. Instead it’s the other, extremely deceptive, change that went along with the overt price hike. Your monthly eMusic fee no longer allows you to purchase 75 tracks; instead you’ll get 75 “credits”. They want you think that a credit equates to a single track, but it quite obviously doesn’t. If you’re purchasing by the album (and for many tracks you have to) then the number of credits required almost always exceeds the number of tracks.

For an admittedly extreme example, consider the epic post-rock album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It has four 20 minute — mind-blowing and highly recommended — tracks. Before the pricing change, this was about 5% of the 75-track monthly quota. Now, downloading this album requires no fewer than 24 credits, which is about a third of quota, and about a 600% increase. None of the tracks can be downloaded individually any more.

So you might think, regardless of the increase, that still works out at just over US$10 for an album, which sounds very fair. But this just begs the question: why don’t they just charge the US$10/album and be done with it?

The subscription plan and the “credits” and all that nonsense is just annoying, and that’s the main reason why I’m leaving. I can pay US$10/album at Amazon and I don’t have to worry about my monthly quota, rollovers, unused credits, the terrible website, the mysteriously “unavailable” albums or individual tracks, and all of the other specific problems with the eMusic service.

I admit I had a good ride. And maybe something had to change at eMusic anyway. The whole premise of charging per track is fraught with problems. The economics of this is predicated on 4 min radio-friendly pop songs, and just doesn’t work out for other types of music.

What I really want is to pay a fixed amount for a fixed duration of music. I’d easily pay US$1 per 10 minutes of music. It seems like absolutely the fairest and simplest way of doing doing things, and the way that eMusic could have changed while still keeping my business.

Failing that I’ll just pay per album. But not at eMusic.

Hits

The subscription model is fantastic. It’s great to be able to just pick a plan to match the rate at which you discover new music, or get sick of music in your existing collection. The subscription promotes a totally different mindset for purchasing music, one that is more optimistic and more willing to experiment. This is a good thing for all concerned.

Also the prices are quite reasonable. Better than reasonable really; $10 for 30 songs per month.

Unlike Amazon’s store, emusic is actually available to Australians, and presumably other non-USians as well. Hooray! In the past I’ve noticed some tracks on emusic have been not available “in my region”, but now that I’ve gone looking for them I can’t find any. Either way, it’s pretty rare.

The music selection is really good, and getting better. I’ve found that they have a lot of quite obscure titles and artists. In general Amazon might be better for the older back catalogue, and the more mainstream artists, but between the two there is more than enough keep you amused.

In writing this article, I just noticed that Radiohead is finally available through emusic. Just the one album, In Rainbows, but it’s a start.

The tracks are mostly ~160Kbps MP3s, encoded with LAME 3.96. I haven’t noticed any quality problems, but then again I haven’t heard them against the originals in a double-blind test, so take that statement for what it’s worth.

As well as music they now have a pretty decent collection of DRM-free audiobooks. (Just for the record, I refuse to use Audible on account of their DRM).

The monthly rate of $10 for 1 book is charged in addition to any music plan you might have, and yet it’s still the cheapest way to get audiobooks that I know of.

Misses

They don’t always score hits though. For one, the website is absolutely awful. I mean really awful. It’s difficult to navigate, and it’s hideously ugly. Not a good combination. Still, you can get used to it and find the music you’re after and use it to select either individual songs to download or entire albums.

But the frustration really starts when you’ve got 9 songs left in your monthly quota and you want to download a 10 song album. You might think that it would just send you the first 9 and queue the remaining song until the start of the next billing cycle. Nope! Instead, you have to click to download each of the 9 songs individually and then remember to get the last one next month. DO NOT WANT!

To download the music there is a download helper application, but it’s a klunky PowerPC application and won’t automatically add tunes to iTunes. (Or maybe I’m missing something?)

So after you’ve downloaded the songs and manually added them to iTunes, you’ll be underwhelmed by the lack of album art. Then, because like me you’re quite anal-retentive about metadata, you’ll go straight off to somewhere like Amazon or Discogs to bring the new tracks up to your exacting standards.

And speaking of metadata, there’s very little application of it on the website. This isn’t a gripe so much as a missing feature. They know what music everyone has downloaded, surely there are some basic correlations and recommendations to be made? They have made a token effort here but frankly they Could Try Harder.

I wonder why they don’t just outsource the community aspect of their site to someone like last.fm? Oh yeah, now I remember.

Despite these problems you certainly could do worse (like buying from MSN Music, oops!) so overall recommended. The market is still new, more players are needed.