Chad Batka for The New York Times
I’m not sure what to make of this news. As the NYT says – “In another example of struggling major music labels and Internet services finding common ground, Sony Music Entertainment has agreed to make its back catalog of songs available on eMusic, one of the largest music retailers on the Web.”
They go on – “The major labels had long been skeptical of the economics behind eMusic’s proposition to consumers. Subscribers to eMusic’s “basic” plan, for example, pay $11.99 a month to download 30 songs — or about 40 cents a song, far below the prices on Apple’s iTunes. Songs are in the MP3 format and do not have restrictions against copying. As part of the deal, eMusic says it will slightly raise prices and reduce the number of downloads for some of its monthly plans. ”
My quick take – the labels’ greatest assets are arguably their back catalogs. Making them available is a giant step as eMusic offers DRM-free files but if a file is available for 40 cents on average does this not dilute the value of the back catalog? Meanwhile, long time subscribers to eMusic get hurt by a price hike and restrictions on downloads.
Sound As Language has a great opinion piece about this move.
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This sure would have been nice back when I could afford my big emusic membership. Now I’m down to 10 a month.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:41 amI’ve been an eMusic member for a long time… and this is really annoying news to me. I don’t really care all that much about Sony’s backcatalogue for the most part, and I suspect a lot of eMusic fans won’t either, although I could be wrong. For me eMusic has always been a discreet way to get new indie music from small labels legally and at a very low price. They just announced that they’re going to gut my membership nearly in half for the same monthly price (50 downloads a month versus 90) — that’s more than “slightly raising” its prices, proportionally speaking. I might cancel and go the route of being more selective via other channels, where I know the money is getting less fully absorbed by the retailer’s infrastructure (Amazon or Boomkat as 2 examples that come to mind)… I suspect others are likely to do the same.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:48 amI’m a longtime subscriber too, and eMusic has been very good about letting me keep my ‘non-standard’ plan (right now I still get 50 downloads for $11.99, vs the 24 that is standard for the ‘basic’ plan). No more – it’ll go down to 30 downloads at the end of July.
For more recent subscribers, is the number of downloads actually going up (from 24 to 30 downloads)?
eMusic is already fairly niche, as it only makes economic sense for relatively heavy music users – if you don’t download more than about 15 songs a month, you should purchase music a la carte. But I suspect that they have a lot of churn – people who sign on, realize after a few months that they aren’t downloading enough music to justify it, and then quit. Adding the back catalog material might help retain them.
But Dave, I agree with you – not sure what’s in it for the majors. And now that they’ve made a unilateral change to my account, I’m a little worried, as an eMusic user, about what else is coming down the pipe.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:49 amI just checked and my annual plan, which gave me 90 downloads a month, will be downgraded to 35 downloads a month come December.
This is a BIG increase. Right now I pay $191.90 a year for 90 downloads a month, or $0.18 a song. Next year I will pay $171.99 for 35/month, or $0.41 a song — a 128% price hike!
Way to reward old and loyal customers, eMusic.
I do give them props for trying to sweeten the deal, though, by giving me a “15-track booster pack” in August. And as a committed album lover (sorry Dave), I do appreciate their new album pricing, which “will allow you to download selected albums of 12 or more tracks for the price of 12 downloads.” Remains to be seen what “selected” means, but hopefully this will make it easier to snap up Sufjan Stevens’ next 60-song opus.
Oh well, it’s been a good run, and now the party is over. I hope these big price increases mean than the indie, jazz and international artists whose music brings me to eMusic will get more money now. But I really doubt it, especially when “Born To Run” crowds them off the best-seller lists.
June 1st, 2009 at 3:00 pmI will experience the same deal as Jim above. I legally download a lot of music and I’m not happy about Sony on eMusic. For the most part, I don’t want major label music. EMusic loses my recommendation to friends with this move. I recommend Amie Street, which does not have a big selection yet, but is the source of some great bargains.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:45 pmI just cancelled my account before renewal in two days. Significant cut in download count for about the same money as before, as described above, were the changes they announced to me in email. If I stayed a subscribed for two months, I would have gotten a download pack as a reward. Oh well. The thing is, they aren’t actually that much less than Amazon, for example, when you consider not every album on Amazon is $9.99 or $11.99… some (back catalog, at that) releases are as little as $3.99 or $6.99 for major arists. Not that Amazon is my hero or anything, but the idea of a subscription service where it is so expensive to explore independent/underground artists isn’t the same thing as what eMusic has promoted itself as until… until today. Oh well.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:49 pmi have been a long-time emusic user. my account has been on hiatus due to my being unemployed, but now i will probably just cancel it. i do not care about sony’s offerings, even if i do think they have some decent bands in the back catalog. i don’t doubt that they’ll attract a lot of new customers who can’t be bothered with exploring the previously unheard. but, wow, what a way to stick it to loyal, long-term users.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:57 pmSome of that jazz, classical, and hip-hop would be nice, but my monthly downloads will be dropping from 75 to 50. 75 is already feels like barely enough. Ugh. Maybe the new album pricing (a cost of 12 downloads for long albums) will make up for it.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:10 pmI’ve been an eMusic subscriber since the beginning days of all you can eat and it has been slowly dropping my benefits ever since. They grandfathered me in at a higher level (40/month for $9.99 last I checked) than can be had as a new subscriber, so will be interesting to see what mine changes to. Emusic is still a decent deal — 3-4 albums a month for 10 bucks. I’m sure there is stuff in Sony’s catalog I want that is missing from my collection, but increasingly I am finding myself listening to recommendation engines like last.fm, pandora or just my favorite dj’s throughout the week (like Dave’s WOXY show).
Interestingly, the same week eMusic announced this, Napster just informed me that my annual subscription was dropping in price from 120 to 60 bucks and they are throwing in 60 free downloads. As long has they have ALL the tracks of a release, I’m just has happy to stream that everywhere in my home rather than rip/store/manage CD’s I already own (or buy new ones). Subscription services rock.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:48 pmTo add to my original comment… it’s a bit telling that eMusic has opted to add a free booster pack to member accounts in early AUGUST, not in July, probably because they’re already banking on a lot of people bailing…. but hoping that they’ll get people to stick around at least an extra month at a higher price per download.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:23 pmHere is a link to eMusic’s blog and a note from the Editor in Cheif:
http://17dots.com/2009/06/01/how-we-approach-sony/
They update pretty frequently so I’m sure the staff will have more responses to this in the coming days.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:32 pmhow profitable is emusic as an entity? is it struggling or growing?
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:55 am[...] As you may have heard, eMusic inked a contract with Sony to make the label’s back catalog available for download (with a moving wall of two years), including albums by Bruce Springsteen, Modest Mouse and, um, Michael Jackson. I don’t have an MBA from Harvard, and I’m not a self-described ‘Internet (insert buzzword) guru’. But I can’t imagine that any business strategy that starts by alienating your most loyal customers is the way to go, and that’s exactly what eMusic did. Not in the nebulous, ‘the cool kids won’t like it’ way (which they may also have done), but in the real, live ‘hits you in the wallet’ way, as long-term subscribers are losing their grandfathered-in plans at the end of July and getting fewer tracks for the same price; in my own case, dropping from 50 downloads a month to 30. Needless to say, people are unhappy. [...]
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:22 ameMusic editor-in-chief Yancey Strickler posts some thoughts on the Sony/eMusic deal. Doesn’t mollify the long time subscribers…
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:27 am[...] Dave Allen: eMusic editor-in-chief Yancey Strickler posts some thoughts on the Sony/eMusic deal. Doe… [...]
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:59 am[...] Sony Music makes Back Catalog Available Through eMusic [...]
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:07 amFWIW, there is a facebook group for matters relating to the emusic price hike and sellout to Sony:
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:16 pmhttp://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=81281012678