the new emusic

22Jul08

Today is the day that we tear down the walls and unveil a brand new album page on eMusic, the first of several transformations to the site geared towards helping you discover even more music. The page includes many features that connect eMusic to the web at large, including direct feeds from YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia containing content relating to that album; integrated links allowing you to share your favorite music with social media sites like Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us and others; and easy access to associated eMusic editorial, perhaps the most useful feature of all.

Over the past two years, we have been canvassing input from you, our customers. We have traveled to several cities to meet you directly, surveyed you repeatedly, tirelessly read your message board and 17 Dots posts, and combed through literally thousands of emails. Your input has shaped our thinking. One thing we mostly clearly understood: there is room for improvement. So, we set out to fundamentally improve eMusic in unprecedented ways.

The process of discovering music has changed completely in the past five years. Recommendations from friends or that friendly record store clerk have always been some of the best ways to find music, and the web — whether it’s YouTube, Facebook or 17 Dots — has made that process even easier. With our incredible community of music lovers and a catalogue worthy of them, eMusic has become one of the key hubs for indie music on the web, and the improvements to the album page will accentuate that. We think it makes us the best place, hands down, to discover and purchase music. That’s what we think, of course, but we’re confident that after you spend time with the page, you’ll agree.

There are a few things in particular I would like to point out: first, we’ve made it easier for you to write reviews of albums. I’ve downloaded many an album based on one of the user reviews, and I’m sure I’m not alone there. Second, you will note a box called “Discover” underneath the album information on each page. These are handpicked features by our world-class editorial team highlighting great Dozens, hubs and features related to that album. In some cases it will be an interview with the artist in question, in others it might put the album in a broader context: if you’re checking out an Avett Brothers album, we’re guessing you might be interested in our Young String Bands Dozen, for instance. And third, the YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia boxes, which harness some of the great user-generated content available on the web. All in all, it provides a full, robust experience.

Your next question might be, “why aren’t iTunes and Amazon doing this?” Good question. We believe we are raising the bar for the experience any digital entertainment retailer offers their customers.

This is just the beginning of the dramatic product improvements you’ll see over the next six months. Every few weeks, between now and the end of the year, we’ll roll out meaningful improvements to our service, some dramatic and some subtle. Recently we saw the new Download Manager and embedded sound samples, and soon you will see a new homepage, a much improved recommendation engine, new search and browse functionality, new artist and audiobook pages, and so much more. The eMusic team has been single-mindedly working on these improvements for the last year or more and we’re happy and proud to finally be able to share them with you. Check it out and let us know what you think. As always, as our customers, your opinions matter most.

david.

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53 Responses to “the new emusic”

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1 aphexbr on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

The changes look OK so far, but there’s a few criticisms:

- The message boards don’t show up properly in Firefox 3 - the fonts are ridiculously small and unreadable.

- The YouTube/Wiki links are a little flaky and inaccurate. For example, if I look at Hybrid, most of the YouTube results are irrelevant while the Wiki link goes to an irrelevant page (Amarok’s Wikipedia tab goes straight to the band page).

- Some of the album artwork no longer appears that was visible before the upgrade.
2 Dave on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

I love the new additions, but the layout is really wide…I have to full-screen my browser to see it all. Any chance you can trim the size, or the size of the border?
3 johnkeane on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

It’s pretty wide: minimum width of 1200px?!

My screen resolution is 1280px in width, but I have the taskbar in vertical mode on the left-hand side of my screen, giving me an effective width for my browser of about 1100px. So unless I switch firefox to full screen mode, I get a horizontal scrollbar and the right-hand part of the website gets cut off.

The thing is, your content is (I think) about 1024px in width, maybe slightly wider, and does fit into my browser window - it’s just that you’ve added (unnecessary) padding to both sides…

The other things all look sort of cool and nice, but I don’t want to comment on them without using them for a bit.
4 Aidan on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

The new album art feature is fantastic. I’ve been waiting so long for something like this!
5 adam on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

I love the new look, especially big fonts and easy to use navigation, but as stated in prev posts, too wide. I’m running double cinema displays and can see everything, but I don’t want to be forced to maximize my browser to see full width.

I hate that you can’t read the review and easily sample the tracks anymore. I have to close the full review to select another track and go back to the modal window. This new enhancement immediately made me rethink the usability thinking about all features.

I love the new ways to discover music.

I don’t like that I can’t add comments when adding albums to my lists. Unless I’m missing something, I have to go to my list to add descriptions. I used to be able to add info when adding to lists, but that seems to have disappeared.

I love the big artwork.

Overall, more good than bad, but the review/track sampling issue might be an ender for me. (maybe, once “read more” clicked, just have the review extend to full view in the column on the left?)
6 Rob G. (Captain Wrong) on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Mentioned on the message boards, but I really appreciate the Saved for Later being more accessible. Also appreciate the larger artwork (will the download manager start grabbing this?) although I am also noticing some stuff missing since the change.
7 mrshl on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

I think it looks great! I didn’t social or sharing features mentioned, but I wrote a long post quite a while back in which I expressed frustration with the lack of these features on Emusic.

http://mrshl.vox.com/library/post/the-future-of-emusic-what-id-like-to-see.html

I’m a longtime subscriber, and each month I write a blog post highlighting my downloads this month. But I really shouldn’t have to. It should be easy to add your friends and share your music choices. It should be easy to subscribe to feeds of your friends’ lists or “Saved for Later”.

I’ve been impressed with the strides Emusic has made recently, but I hope there are plans to improve the friends feature and make sharing easier.
8 Scott on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

I’d like to second Aphexbr’s criticism regarding the microscopic type size of the message board. It’s almost unreadable to me unless I bump up my font sizes, and then everything else looks jumbled.
9 fdr daddy o on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

i think that the use of flickr images violates the flickr tos, and certainly violates copyright in the case of all rights reserved images.
why not rescript so that only non commercial cc images feed in, or start an emusic group on flickr?
10 chris on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Seems like there are a few problems with firefox 3.

IE seems to be fine, which i rarely use.

eg. save for later, add to list and the dig deeper is not available for me.

Otherwise i think this is a great improvement and I am sure once the kinks are straightened out this will be awesome ( well its pretty good as it is… )
11 Alex Ingram on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Looks nice, but far far too wide - unusable on this laptop with a 1024px wide screen.
Unless you’re trying to force me to plug my laptop into my nice wide TV screen in order to download music could you please ensure that the site is usable on a 1024 pixel wide screen as a matter of supreme urgency?
12 Sean on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Great work!! You guys just keep getting better and better
13 DJ Wren on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Please bring back User Lists to the album pages.
14 skerzo on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

All looking good - I’m sure niggles will be ironed out (since when did a site redesign go perfectly on go-live day!).

However, I’d say you were very brave optimising for 1280 pixel width screen res and would be surprised if all of the (unfortunately still) 1024 users will let you keep it so for long!
15 WJPurdy on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Best thing first: Hi-res artwork. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Problems next: I use Firefox 2.x to view the site casually, and eMusic Remote (basically Firefox 2.x) to download — in either platform, buttons seem to not work at all. Clicking Save for Later, for instance, does nothing. But right-clicking and opening Save for Later in a new tab does work. Neither does clicking View Larger work in Firefox. It all works well in IE (which is too bad, because like chris I rarely use IE).

I’ll find out later if this is a problem related to receiving the site update for the first time while Firefox was open — perhaps some components did not load properly and will do so upon restart.

The only other problems I have have already been noted: the message board font sizes are wonky, and the album pages require extensive sidescrolling on my primary computer in order to see all of it. I typically avoid using sites that require horizontal scrolling — I consider it bad and unpleasant design. Hopefully, it’ll be fixed here and I won’t have to make an exception for eMu (you didn’t think I’d unsubscribe because of a sidescrolling issue, did you?)

Aside from what appears to be the lack of thorough testing (and which is probably being feverishly troubleshot at this very moment… nothing like using the public as your beta testers), I like where eMusic is headed with this site upgrade.
16 DJ Wren on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Count me in as one of those 1024 width users voting thumbs down. My little olde PowerBook is what I often use to browse albums and now the site requires so much scrolling it makes me sad.
17 MiDoJo on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Love the new features. New Album artwork part is great, because my brother was just complaining he didn’t like dragging from eMusic to iTunes (BLECH) because “the art is so small) now it’s gigantic; that’s awesome.

I too would like to see a fluid width because, even though it doen’t bother me with my always full ie window on a big screen, there are others out there you don’t have that benefit and I don’t want to scare anyone away from eMusic EVER.

I love the Zine style review column but still would like to see a hide or a report this comment for inappropriate reviews (like people fighting in their reviews)

Neat I missed the post to web (social bookmarking) feature this morning.

and I’m pretty sure “ratings” under my profile wasn’t there before (ha hidden)

Maybe need to add a “navigate the New eMusic” to the news for some people who aren’t as webfriendly as I am. But maybe mrshl or Frank Hecker would do that and let you link to it on the frontpage permenantly

Speaking of Where’d Frank go? I would like to see, here and/or on his page, his reaction since he was the first to break the news (to me) about the changes (sorry I’m a nerd/geek but not enuff to read forbes. . . yet. HA!!!)

MiDoJo is currently Listening to Wierd Al Yankovich’s parody of James Blunt “You’re Pitiful” HA
18 MiDoJo on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRG Please excuse my numerous, horrible grammatical and spelling errors. In my zeal to post I forgot to read it over and spellcheck it. OH well.
19 porieux on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Love the improvements! The album art alone makes an enormous difference to my experience on the site. Love the layout with the user reviews down the side.

I do have an issue with the inline flash player for previewing songs.
It has no volume control and the volume is not maximized, which makes
previews sound worse and quieter than they should..

Fortunately this is an easy fix…either add a volume widget or set
Flash to output maximum volume so we can control with our own volume control..
20 porieux on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

I also would love the ability to customize our lists/profile more.

For a while I had my Last.FM eMusic radion embedded in my profile, until that bug got squashed would love to see an officially supported way to do things like that.
21 DJ Adequate on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Yikes!

There is much here to like, but the lack of user lists and the really, really tiny fonts on the userboards cuts out two of the things that have kept me around on emusic for so many years.

I don’t know if it is because I’m on a mac, but the type is just too tiny to read.

I do like the album art, and the social networking stuff might be okay once I’ve figured it out. But don’t sacrifice your community (through list and bboard) to try and ride the wave of other sites.
22 Daniel, Esq. on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

I like the changes, for the most part. The small quibbles I have will, I’d bet, be worked out fairly soon. I do notice that when I open a disc review, I can’t scroll down to the bottom of it (i.e., whatever’s on screen when I first click the review is all I can read).

Otherwise, I like the choices, and the improved functionality. If this is the right place to make further suggestions, I had a few: (a) some sort of special access to certain artists for eMusic members (e.g., interactive question-and-answer sessions or special windows into the recording studio or tour diaries and so forth) and (b) the option to purchase liner notes for an upcharge and/or the physical disc at a deep discount. There are a lot of albums I try on eMusic, and I love them so much that I’d like the physical disc, but I can’t justify paying the retail price for it after I’ve already purchased it digitally. But at a discount (one that’s only available to, say, eMusic members that downloaded a full disc and still is profitable for the label), I’d buy the physical product, too. (n.1)

____________________________________
(n.1) Obviously, labels would need to agree. But the only rational reason they would object is if they think that, at the moment, many eMusic members will refrain from downloading a disc digitally and instead purchase the physical disc at retail price. I’m sure that’s true for some eMusic members with respect to some artists, but I’d bet it’s a small percentage of the overall market, and I’m confident that the labels would — again, overall — financially benefit from the option I’m suggesting.

Okay. I’m off my soapbox, now.
23 Daniel, Esq. on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Terrible final sentence. It should read as follows: “But at a discount (one that’s only available to, say, eMusic members that downloaded that particular disc (in full) and at a discounted price that is still profitable for the label), I’d buy the physical product, too.”
24 Frank Hecker on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Overall, a nice upgrade — not everything I’d like to see, but a good start. I tried out an album page for “Lantern” by Clogs, Clogs being the example I gave in my original blog post advocating for this sort of thing. One issue is that the information presented from the net is only as good as the metadata by which the information is retrieved. For example, the genre for “Lantern” is given as “new age”, which I think is a miscategorization; this makes the items presented in the “Discover” section somewhat off-base.

Also, there’s no obvious way for subscribers to contribute to solving the problem of irrelevant information. For example, for “Lantern” the first four YouTube videos presented have nothing to do with Clogs, but are videos for other things that have “Clogs” in the title. Wouldn’t it be great if I could easily mark that these are irrelevant videos, so that other eMusic subscribers wouldn’t have to see them? (Of course, someone at eMusic could and should vet such user-contributed changes.)

The bottom line is that I’m happy that eMusic is investing in making the site better, and look forward to further changes. The main message I want to push: Build more mechanisms into the site that enable subscribers to contribute to making the site better. For inspiration, go read Tim O’Reilly on the architecture of participation.
25 Frank Hecker on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Ack! My painstakingly-typed comment got eaten, and I have a cranky someone demanding my attention. So I’ll have to confine myself to three words: architecture of participation. Think more about how subscribers could *directly* make the site better.
26 Brighternow on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Thumbs up for the artwork thing and the Wiki feature.
But I can only see 3/4 of the artwork and it’s not possible to read the full Wiki article. Some adjustments is needed here.

Thumbs down for the wide screen format - This will only work for people with big screens.

And as many before me has stated:
The typing on the message board is too damn small !!!

Suggestions:
To put the credits section, the Explore music.. section and the Related artists next to the tracklist section and put the Dig deeper.. and the Discover more… section at the buttom of the page.
In this way the info directly connected to the release gets first priority and the “explore further” gets second priority.

- And when/if the artists/labels pages gets their turn of improvements, I would love to be able to RSS feed my favourite artists / labels.
27 Brighternow on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Oh yes - I’ve for a long time been dreaming about beeing able to see the part of the artwork where you can read about who’s playing what and where, the name of the producer and that kind of stuff.

So - next week maybe ? (just joking)
28 Bryan on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

It’s convenient that the number of remaining downloads appears at the top of page, but I would love to see the turnover date appear there as well. Since it changes every month I have more than once been caught off guard and missed the deadline.
29 Scott Reeves on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

Looking good. Slick and functional. I’ll keep my eye out for more goodies. Thank you!
30 Jens Alfke on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

I’ll try to recap my initial comments, hopefully without using any word that might lead to the dreaded broken CAPTCHA.

The overall design, use of serif type, and large artwork are all great. Thanks!

The 1200-pixel-wide layout is very bad. I do have a big screen but I use it to view multiple windows, not to fill my whole field of view with one web page. There are plenty of CSS tutorials that will show you how to design layouts that scale nicely to whatever width the user has chosen for the browser window.

The modal display of the album review is an embarrassing UI design gaffe. You’ve used trendy AJAX lightbox technology to re-invent the modal dialog box and rediscovered why modal dialogs are a Very Bad Idea. The old eMusic UI had the right idea: progressive disclosure by enlarging the review area in place.
31 Jens Alfke on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

(And look! Now my earlier posts are starting to straggle in, after I thought they were lost! All’s well that ends well, I guess, and sorry for all the repetititition.)
32 Daniel, Esq. on Jul 22nd, 2008 said:

“The modal display of the album review is an embarrassing UI design gaffe. You’ve used trendy AJAX lightbox technology to re-invent the modal dialog box and rediscovered why modal dialogs are a Very Bad Idea. The old eMusic UI had the right idea: progressive disclosure by enlarging the review area in place.”

I think this is what I was saying upthread. I just want to be able to scroll down to the bottom of a lengthy album review (e.g., an AMG or eMusic review), and I can’t do that at the moment.
33 zongamin on Jul 23rd, 2008 said:

Nice idea but its far too wide!

You need to make it fit on a 1024 screen.

Please fix this quickly.
34 zgreen on Jul 23rd, 2008 said:

Looks pretty good so far, but I’d like to as my name to the (growing) list of people who don’t like the wide screen format. Thanks!
35 chris on Jul 23rd, 2008 said:

ok sorted out the firefox 3 problems and everything seems to be workign well.

What i did was to clear out the cache and cookies etc.

Now i am getting all of the content and features on the new album pages.

This is ff 3.0.

Tools | Clear Private Data

yehhhh!
36 chris on Jul 23rd, 2008 said:

sorted for ff 3.0

just cleared my cache and cookies. now all of the new features work fine.
37 jon on Jul 23rd, 2008 said:

Aside from the price per download and the excellent selection, two things that I enjoy about eMusic are reading the features (interviews, dozens, etc.) and reading the recommendations (from your writers as well as my fellow users). I like the magazine, and I love 17dots. You’ve got some great writers on staff, who are knowledgeable, passionate, and inquisitive about music. I feel heartened by David’s message, especially the third from last paragraph, which indicates that eMusic will continue to provide unique content, as well as continuing to incorporate user-generated content.

Having said that, I would like to echo the comments asking that you return users’ lists to the album pages. I know those pages are already cluttered, but those lists represent subscriber-generated content that is unique to eMusic. We take pride in our lists!
38 MiDoJo on Jul 23rd, 2008 said:

HA I was just about to post the Opposite of Daniel ESQ. I like the new “lightbox” effect for the What we Say Reviews.

Oh well different strokes for different folks (for those that don’t know Daniel is really and Alien and MiDoJo doesn’t really exist HA)
39 John on Jul 23rd, 2008 said:

Overall I like the new format. In the past the suggestions offered by the emusic editorial stall has led me to many artists and albums of which I was not aware. For this I am thankful. I haven’t yet investigated all the new features. however, I have noticed 2 problems. Everyone has discussed page width. Likewise I have to scroll right to see everything on the page. The second thing I noticed is that many albums say art work is not available. When in the past emusic has displayed the album artwork. In fact when I go to my saved album pages the artwork is still there.

Well anyway I look forward to your future changes. Thanks
40 Alexei M on Jul 23rd, 2008 said:

Modal dialogs and scrollbars, oh my!

1024 pixel screens are just screwed.

But, hi-res album covers.
41 porieux on Jul 23rd, 2008 said:

I think calling the full screen reviews and album artwork ‘modal dialog boxes’ is kind of disingenuous. Those aren’t dialog boxes, they are full screen displays..it’s the equivalent of a popup window on a site like Amazon, which is far worse. One click and it’s gone, it’s not a Ui gaffe at all.
42 Alexei M on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

porieux: You can’t do anything else on the site while Lightbox/modal dialog is there. What’s more, I see three different sets of scrollbars when I click to expand a review. Three! A popup window has controls to do whatever you want with it: you could make it fullscreen if you want. But why would you want a review to launch in a popup anyway?

Some of these UI choices are kind of embarrassing. The Lightbox now is what the splash page was a few years ago.
43 Daniel, Esq. on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

MiDoJo: “HA I was just about to post the Opposite of Daniel ESQ. I like the new “lightbox” effect for the What we Say Reviews.”

I like the Lightbox feature; I just want to be able to scroll down to the bottom of long reviews. I think Yancey said this is a bug that is being worked on, and will be corrected, shortly, which raises another, even more important, point: eMusic deserves tremendous credit for carefully reviewing subscriber comments about the new format, and making changes where appropriate.
44 Daniel, Esq. on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

“(for those that don’t know Daniel is really an[] Alien. . . .)”

I hear this all the time, BTW.
45 captwhiffle on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

I posted a version of this over at the eMu boards, but it might be worth repeating here:

I like the new format, as well, but there are some things I still have to get used to.

Firstly, the album pages are a little loud. I’m not sure that repeating images (doubling them) in the “Discover” section is necessary when there is now so much stuff to take in on a given page.

I liked the pick sign with a check mark, which still appears next to albums in lists and charts, but now it’s a word in a green box on the album page. (I tend to rely on the eMu staff’s opinion pretty heavily, so I’ve come to zero in on that “pick” sign.) I’ll get used to this, but that check mark was an easy to spot identifier for me.

I miss not seeing the user playlists in which a given album appears, but I understand that that will be reintegrated at some point.

I find the ratings a little confusing. Some stars are green, others light gray, others dark gray, others yellow. I think I have it figured out, but I think that using yellow across the board instead of dark gray (to denote how others have rated an album) makes more sense to me. If you look at the page for the Mekons’ _Fear and Whiskey_ (I don’t know how to make hyperlinks here at 17dots. Are there instructions anywhere?), it’s unclear whether any of the reviewers under “You Say…” have yet rated the album, since all 5 stars appear a neutral gray.

I like the “Dig Deeper” section. I often find myself heading over to wikipedia for more information about an artists anyway, so having the window floating over the page is both helpful and makes for a cool effect. (But the one for the Pixies’ _Doolittle_ is wrong; it describes another band called The Pixies Three, so I imagine these wikipedia entries are somehow being selected automatically, and perhaps many will be wrong until humans intervene to correct such mistakes.) On that note, I’d like to see wikipedia links to artists from the artist pages, and wikipedia links to albums from the album pages, but this sort of integration may not be so easily implemented.

I see that the allmusic.com review is still the default for many album/artist descriptions, and that now they are titled “They Say…” These are replaced with “We Say…” once an eMusic staffer writes a review or description. But why not include We Say, You Say, and They Say as a matter of course for all album pages? It seems like more information is better, and one could to toggle the “They Say,” “We Say,” “You Say” sections closed to make the page cleaner.

Finally, I’m happy that hi-res artwork is being added to pages, although I still have iTunes do most of that work for me.

Overall, however, the new album pages look good and are more useful. I haven’t messed around with the Post to the Web feature–it isn’t clear to me *what* will post, but I’ll give it a shot sometime and see what happens.

I think the next step (after attending to the microscopic font on the message boards) would be to add some social networking features here. Private messaging; the ability to share artists, albums, and songs with other eMusikers; custom avatars; groups; etc.–these all seem pretty standard to sites like this one, and they’ve been used to a greater or lesser degree at lala.com and amiestreet.com.

Oh, and while I’m generating suggestions: it sure would be nice if you could find the band !!! when you enter !!! into eMu’s search bar.
46 bpage on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

emu? reconsider…

Thursday, July 24, 2008
11:12 AM

Chuck-eMusic Customer Support has joined this session!

Connected with Chuck-eMusic Customer Support

Hello, barbara! Thank you for contacting eMusic. I’ll be assisting you today.

hi thanks for chatting with me.

To verify security for your account, can you provide the last 8 digits of the credit card you used to register for eMusic?

I don’t have it handy. Besides, it was a debit card.

Access your account, we need the last 8 digits of the credit card number you used to register.

****
we need the last 8 digits

now I have to go find my purse, hold on. (grumble, grumble)

**** ****

Please hold while I access your account.

otay

he number of remaining downloads you are seeing in your account matches our records of your remaining downloads.

From here, you can review what’s already been downloaded from your account. You can also re-download your tracks without losing credits.

so what I cancelled still counts toward my free 50 downloads?

Once you click on a track it is debited from your account.

Once you click on a track or album to download, your account is debited at that time even if your download does not complete.

Once you have selected a track from eMusic, you are allowed to re-download it as many times as you like without losing download credits provided that the album is still available through eMusic and your account is active.

In order to re-download tracks or view what tracks you have downloaded, please follow these steps:

1. Log in to your eMusic account.

this does not make me happy

2. Click on the Your Profile tab on the homepage.

3. Click on the Downloads button.

4. Select the Artists, Albums and Tracks you wish to download from the list provided. If you wish to download an entire album, you may do so by clicking each arrow next to the tracks.

5. Click on the album you wish to download tracks from.

6. Click the blue arrow located next to the track name you are interested in.

I don’t want download credits - I want other tracks. I don’t want the ones that I cancelled, that is why they are cancelled.

…if these downloads are not removed from the que, then they are really not cancelled, they are delayed.

..I feel as if I have been mislead. Now I understand what you have offered me is free, and I thank you for that, I would not have signed up for a free trial of 24 songs. I would not have wasted my time.

you have given me instructions that does not solve this problem. how about some real dialog here in this chat room. Can I chat with your boss for a little while?

We are able to offer only one free trial subscription per person. If we were to offer multiple or unlimited free trials to customers, we would be unable to remain in business as we would be giving out an infinite number of free songs. Allowing people to sign up for multiple free trials would restrict our ability to provide downloads at such a low cost to paying subscribers.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

I do not want more than one free trial. That is not what I am asking for. I do not want multiple or unlimited free trials. That is not what I am asking for. I want you to remain in business. I am a rabid capitalist. I don’t want an infinite number of free songs, I am slightly insulted that you would think that is what I want. I do not want to sign up for multiple free trials.

I want you to honor your agreement to provide a free trial subscription that includes 50 downloads.

We are sorry we were unable to resolve this issue to your satisfaction.

right now I have 24 downloads. my account states that I have ten more downloads. this would equal 34 free downloads instead of the 50 you have contracted to provide for me.

why are you giving up on resolving this problem?
47 bmerikal on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

Overall, a great refresh.

I love being able to preview songs in page! (Even though that’s been there for a while, I thought I’d mention it.)

I *really* miss the users lists. I can’t tell you how many discs I’ve downloaded by checking out what someone else recommends.

I also really like the suggestion of linking to a discounted physical CD if you’ve downloaded the MP3s from eMusic.

Will you be updating the album art for ‘older’ discs that only have the tiny thumbnails of yore? I hope so. Also, I’d rather see a tiny thumb on an album page than a giant, no artwork available FPO image.

I have a wide monitor, so the wide layout doesn’t bother me that much, but I can see where it would be irksome to those with 1024px wide displays.

Now all the non-album pages, need to get updated too.
48 captamaz on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

I like being able to review and read other users lists and album comments…did thay disappear?

Like many others…I listen to Pandora.com When I hear something on Pandora I then go to emusic to try and find the song … which isn’t always convenient or easy. I wish emusic and Pandora worked together in a way that would speed up the process of finding Pandoa songs on emusic and/or make it easier for me to know whether or not the music is available on emusic.

How about enabling emusic subscribers to add/remove various “modules” to their emusic portal (Add Pandora widget, delete youtube widget, add last.fm widget, add currently playing artists touring schedule widget, add my email to currently playing artists mailing list widget

How about some sort of SlimDevices/logitech Squeezebox & squeezenetwork integration?

Looking forward to more updates…it’s about time the site was updated.
49 yancey on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

User lists were temporarily taken down to work on performance issues. They are coming back soon. And horizontal scrolling has been fixed!
50 yancey on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

And member playlists are back!
51 porieux on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

Alexei M, going to have to disagree with you. You can do anything you want while the content is maximized, you just click once. It’s taken over the window at that point anyway so there would be no reason to do anything else before dismissing it. There is no way to integrate content that large into the page, it takes up the full window anyway. Normally this would be done in a popup window but the eMusic solution is more elegant. The scroll thing must be a bug because the scroll bars are working fine for me.
52 MiDoJo on Jul 24th, 2008 said:

Umm While I enjoyed reading the new users customer care chat I must say. . . WTF!?!?!?!?

What is that and why is that here and most importantly how is eMusic (the site) to know that you (or rather she) clicked cancel on a client based program that takes place AFTER YOU DOWNLOADED THE TRACK (i.e. the emp/emx file) from the eMusic Server.

More importantly, why am I taking up more of the 17dots reader’s time to rant about why Barbara has posted this???

Because I have no idea what she is asking eMusic to reconsider, nor what it has to do with a)the New eMusic and/or b)17dots (the eMusic EDITORIAL staff). LOL

(Yes!! I remembered the spellcheck, this time.)

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