keeping emusic different
eMusic fashions itself as the Internet’s corner music store. We take great pride in the discovery, passion, and value of the eMusic experience. Most of all, we are proud of the community of eMusic members, and I read 17 Dots daily to learn what is on everyone’s mind.
My name is Danny Stein, and I’ve been involved with eMusic since 2003, first as CEO and then as executive chairman. Over the last few years, we added millions of tracks, hundreds of thousands of subscribers, thousands of pages of editorial, and used technology to build an alternative to behemoth stores such as Amazon and iTunes. As we roll out significant improvements to the site in the coming months, I’ve proudly resumed the role of CEO. You’ll hear more from me as we broaden our selection of music and audiobooks and enhance the customer experience through product innovation and social network integration.
Like most music fans, I read the news about Apple raising the prices for DRM-free downloads to $1.29 with concern. eMusic was the first online service to sell DRM-free music in the MP3 format, and one of the first to offer digital music at less than 99 cents per track. eMusic anticipated these developments years before they were adopted at iTunes and Amazon.
While I am CEO, I promise that eMusic will never sell single MP3 downloads for more than .99 cents. We’ve heard from so many of you that eMusic’s subscription pricing encourages you to download music that you would not have otherwise purchased in an a la carte $1.29/$.99 cent world. Anyone who wishes to discover music at a greater value can join eMusic today and receive some free downloads just for trying us. If you like what you hear, additional downloads start as low as 40 cents per track. We remain committed to offering customers what they want: music that plays on any device at a great value.
I continue to be more enthusiastic than ever about our mission. If you have suggestions on ways we can improve your eMusic experience, let us know what you think via the message boards or this blog. I look forward to talking with you in the weeks and months to come.
Thanks,
Danny Stein
Chairman and CEO, eMusic
This is the way independent music should be.
dedication to a good product is the only reason you guys are still in business and it’s the only reason that music devotees spend their money with you. keep it up! (not that itunes or amazon have bad products, they’re just different.)
It’s awesome to hear your thoughts on the eMusic experience. If it wasn’t for eMusic, I do’t know how I could afford listening to music; I’d have to let somethign as beautiful and unique as music become a small corner of my life. Thanks to eMusic, I get to discover new artists and listen to many I enjoy regularly at a much lower cost. I feel like I’m paying less for music, but also that my subscription supports the kind of music I want to succeed.
I’ve only been a member for about 17 months, but I love the site and hope to be a member at some level for years to come. I feel like this is the best music experience I’ve ever been a part of. I subscribe, but not to rent; I get to own. I don’t feel like Big Brother is admonishing me for trying to share what I love about music; I get to introduce people to music they would have never otherwise heard of. As the site continues to improve, I contiue to find myself amazed by how much better the entire experience has already become, and I look forward to the future of the site and the music that continues to be the heart of it.
Thank you so much for keeping an affordable service going! Because of my ethics and beliefs about music and the music industry I refuse to buy DRM files or purchase from businesses that rely on “selling” (or technically we could call it renting…) DRM music. I also prefer to pay for my music so that the artists are fairly compensated for their efforts, so I don’t like using Limewire or any of the other illegal methods of aquiring music. eMusic is right there perfectly in the middle, legal and free of forced “management” of the files I buy, and is the best service I’ve come across. Keep up the good work, you guys are doing a great job so far!
Thank you mr. Stein and happy Passover from Israel.
Every day you find here some very cool new albums.
eMusic is a revolution and the only place to put your heart & money in it.
So as just from today two very hot albums:
http://www.emusic.com/album/Shuta-Hasunuma-Pop-Ooga-MP3-Download/11426032.html
http://www.emusic.com/album/SKOLD-vs-KMFDM-SKOLD-vs-KMFDM-MP3-Download/11396593.html
eMusic is great and I recommend it widely, but how about full transparency about the album release date schedule? The skimpy list of 8-12 albums that’s on the bottom of the New Music Page, just doesn’t cut it. This would be a much more valuable feature than links to Wikipedia/Flickr/Youtube.
Thanks too, Danny for posting on here about the iTunes DRM/pricing change. I can’t imagine paying more than .99 for a single track, and wonder why the price wouldn’t go down instead of up for most MP3 songs, since websites like Amazon, eMusic, Amie Street, Lala, and others have gone that direction for a few years (or longer).
While I do obtain music from a variety of online and offline music retailers, I get the bulk of music from eMusic. In fact, I just upgraded from 50 DL a month to 75. 9 times out of 10 when I find about a new band on music blogs and podcasts, I will find something by them on eMu. While I am sad (and sometimes annoyed) when a label pulls/ reposts music by an artist I downloaded from on here or have in my Save For Later list, I continue to find new albums and artist to download. Thanks everyone at eMusic!
As low as 40 cents per track? Are you guys raising your prices? Isn’t Emusic Premium something like 27 cents per track? Just thought that was odd.
If Emusic started costing more than, say, 35 cents/track I’d probably bail and go buy used CDs at the record store a block away.
Thankyou Emusic for saving me from neglecting responsibilities to feed my passion for music… most labels that I love are now on it- Kompakt, Border Community, Touch etc…
However, there definitely are improvements to be made, I am sure many are on the table.. my two cents worth would be-
1. Improved personalisation and interaction- to be able to link itunes/WMP etc ratings with emusic- even for albums not purchased on emusic ( I have 1000 cd’s that i am still loading onto my pc, it is tedious and clunky to try to go into emusic to rate or review these- i rarely if ever do it), this could be integrated into the Download manager. To be able to see my whole emusic history in there, even after emptying the emusic folder for whatever reason, and having the ability to add reviews from my whole library without going to the page on emusic would be a huge impetus to write reviews would have a dramatic influence on emusic a whole. It should be looked at with the whole social network integration improvements mentioned in your letter.
Very simply, to be able to add a photo to ones profile would have a huge impact on the desire to interact on the site.
2. I agree with improving the upcoming albums notices. Us impatient types are always looking at what’s next…
3. Being able to upgrade yearly subscriptions on a pro rata basis; and for there to be more than a 75 per month quota on offer. With most people, money comes in dribs and drabs, i would like to be able to whack $100- or so here and there to boost and/ or extend my subscription. Booster packs are rather expensive therefore i resist buying them.My only other option is to add another subscription, but this is annoying- i had one and now I have lost my history (why is complicated but it felt unnecessarily divided).
Also, in my current position, monthly direct debits are impossible…
4. It would be nice to be updated when labels or albums are made available to Australia (or other countries) though not new releases. i only found out that Border Community had been cleared last week by random chance. i am still waiting for ‘Pretty Swell Explode’ by “Odd Nosdam’ to be made available- a reply to an email to the label a few months back assured me it should not be unavailable to Australia, it has not been fixed up after saying he had emailed you. I do tend to wonder how many albums like this slip the net. I am sure that improving links and reviews etc will make it worthwhile for more Australian labels and distributors to submit their catalogues to emusic.
5. I would be quite open, particularly if subscription limits could be increased, to pay, for example 2 credits for one track to get albums by labels that refuse to be included on emusic because of low prices, this could be opening a pandora’s box though!
All in all though, you likely have me for life with or without these improvements. However anything to bring in and retain customers will improve and cement availability of affordable tunes for us; and will turn the tide from either the too expensive Itunes or illegal downloading which will benefit the artists and labels if they work with it.
Hi Chairman & CEO
Please open your store for my country, Indonesia.
I was a loyal subscriber since 2006, only to have my country abruptly banned some time in 2008, with no emails explaining why. I just simply cannot login anymore and told that eMusic in unavailable in my country.
That sucks hard.
Regards
Yoga Nandiwardhana
Woot props to your promise Danny, I read today’s news and knew I’d download even less from amazon (and I only recently popped my (cr)apple chery and even then it was for 25 dollar gift card from xmas (Got Decemberists (n/a on U.S. Emusic) K’Naan (n/a of U.S. eMusic) and Orb’s Live 93 39 Evil (N/a anywhere) and now I will not use crapple at all LOL
Hi Sara and Yancey I hopes you both feel better
I love eMusic as a way of discovering new music, but find the search functionality frustrating – particularly if you’re looking for a track with a common title by a prolific artist (e.g. a cover of a jazz standard, by an artist who has many albums on eMusic) – it would be great to be able to search for artist and title together.
re: it would be great to be able to search for artist and title together.
1
I agree that the search on emusic lacks a lot, a user, zg, has developed a very good search tool for use on emusic, linked to last.fm and other sites, it’s heartily approved by many users on the message boards.
I’d like to suggest that the CEO and other top management checks out the site’s message boards regularly, if you don’t do so already. That’s where many users post good and bad points about emusic, maybe ignore the trolls like many of us try to though!
Principle amongst my bugbears with emusic’s site usability, is the half-thought out adaptations to web 2.0. While many may like the linking to facebook and so on, many of the newer features only half work when introduced and seem to take an age to get sorted fully, maybe some more beta testing please, before we’re all stuck with a broken website, again?
Issues like lists, neighbours, profile features(some reviews and downloaded albums seem to be on a mission to appear on all of our review/download pages), and it’s been like that since sometime last year, unfixed. Which just puts some users off of using what can be a very useful aid to finding more downloads, and possibly spending more money at emusic on booster! Hint!
Back to full testing, please don’t impose any more DLM upgrades, or similar, as has happened in the past and please do not let emusic staff insist that this type of thing works well, as happened with Remote. That has been proven to be so wrong and just led to more users avoiding emusic’s software and using a far superior, faster and leaner DLM made by another user. We don’t all want zillions of bells and whistles unavoidably attached to what we use to download the product with, many of us want just the music, and fast, nothing else. I, and many others, really have no need to let the universe know what I’ve downloaded 2 seconds ago. How about doing fuller market research on what users want, rather than getting some job-lot of newish web-features that are so slow and only half work. Maybe give us the option to opt-in to the new features, especially if their testing remains so hit and miss before they are landed on us, rather than all get landed with pageload-drag issues that many don’t want.
I can’t imagine how long it would take to load each page with all that dig deeper stuff that I don’t want, if I was still having to use dial-up! Some people have no option than to use that type of internet connection, it’s all that’s available to them, where is the consideration for them? Where is the consideration for those in countries where the internet may still be a communal experience, rather than in every bed room and living space? Who needs a photo of a cake when they like the band Cake?! Who needs videos of burials when they like Burial?
OK, that’s enough negative stuff, for now!
Positive stuff? Lots and lots of excellent music at a very good price and all DRM free, which is why I came to emusic initially, not for bells and whistles, I can get them at a party store.
i think you should open a bar where a number of us regulars could hang out. mebbe we could get 40 digital beers and work out some of the finer points in the “do not feed the trolls” thread.
let’s see itunes hang with that!
also, i think you should retroactively un-ban ejunkie from the message boards, re-connect with gosatango mebbe then i’ll re-appoint mahseff as high minister of blessedness.
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First off I love eMusic and all the great music I’ve found there. My Save For Later list has crossed into the realm of near madness. HOWEVER, the little glitches and oddities I’ve gotten used to BUT lately a really annoying one has come up. It was the Shanachie label that brought this to light with some kind of recent reclassification that resulted in 1. their albums in my Download History showing 0 tracks, which is a) not terribly useful and b) if one were unwise enough not to have backed up a track and somehow lost it, you will have to cough up another DL. 2. Any of those albums that were in either your Save For Later or any of your compiled Lists disappear – poof! like they were never there. 3. Any Reviews or Ratings you gave them vanish as well, so a fair amount of effort has evaporated in one fell swoop. The rub here is that eMusic members put in this kind of effort out of their love of and excitement for music – we’re music freaks basically I’m figuring and sharing that excitement is a great thing. Also the Ratings, Reviews and Lists of other members is one of the best ways to explore the eMusic realm, find great stuff and new music you might have never found otherwise, and any glitch that results in not being able to access that information is a loss, not to mention, wink wink nudge nudge, a loss of possible commerce for eMusic. So anything that can be done to facilitate our mutual joy would be most appreciated. Thanks very much to all.
re: If you have suggestions on ways we can improve your eMusic experience, let us know what you think via the message boards
What message boards?
@Scott http://www.emusic.com/messageboard/TopicBrowse.html
Scott– The link to the message boards is a bit hidden, but it’s at the bottom of every Emusic page.
“While I am CEO, I promise that eMusic will never sell single MP3 downloads for more than .99 cents.”
That’s less than a penny a track. Your promise is broken already.
“We take great pride in the discovery, passion, and value of the eMusic experience. Most of all, we are proud of the community of eMusic members, and I read 17 Dots daily to learn what is on everyone’s mind.”
You’re a lying douchebag Danny boy.
Mr. Stein:
Please read what your customers have to say about your letter at this link:
http://www.emusic.com/messageboard/viewTopic.html?topicId=188471
Then get back to us, OK?
Gracias por la informaci