-          All of eMusic’s labels are treated exactly the same, major and independent – we are paying all of them exactly the same, and we are using the same method to determine the pricing for their content.

-         The rates eMusic is now paying the independent labels for their music, and therefore the indie artists they represent, are either remaining the same as they have always been or, in most cases moving forward, increasing for their content.

-          eMusic’s retail prices are determined using a variable pricing formula that is based on release date and pricing choices that are within the label’s control.

-          eMusic has always championed the value and importance of independent music and always will.   Over the course of the last year, we have been proud to throw our full editorial weight behind each new release on Merge, Beggars and Domino – spotlighting their breaking artists, conducting extensive interviews with longtime favorites, and giving these editorial pieces top billing on our homepage. We will continue to hold fast to this voice and we invite our members to stay with us as we continue to grow and improve eMusic.

In the process of expanding our catalog and making the changes necessary to serve our members and ensure the long-term sustainability of our business, a few labels have chosen to exclude themselves from the new comprehensive eMusic offering.  We are treating all labels equally and therefore we believe fairly.  We will greatly miss their artists and their music and trust that they will find their way back to our members soon.

We remain committed to the unique voice we have cultivated on the eMusic site, and to highlighting the music that inspires us, whether it’s sold 4 or 4 million copies, regardless of what label has released it.  Our focus is on our members and we look forward to working with all of our label partners – new and existing – and to creating a service that benefits them, their artists and our members.

Adam Klein, eMusic CEO

Today, we want to let our U.S. subscribers know that soon we’ll be adding even more of the music you want from the catalogues of labels like Arista, Columbia, Epic and RCA – that means artists including the Strokes, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and The Clash to name a few. True to eMusic’s standards, we’ll put this body of work in the right context with helpful insight and recommendations from our expert editorial staff with a pronounced emphasis on the places where the legends and our favorite indie artists intersect.

The addition of these bold-face names doesn’t change our mission. eMusic will always be an alternative to mass market digital music stores — a deeper, richer music shopping experience. Over the past year, we’ve added a host of new features to re-create the experience of the corner music store using the technological advantages of the web to supplement our tried and true human touch.

As you already know, musical context today doesn’t exclusively come from an LP cover or liner notes, but rather from many sources throughout the web. eMusic album and artists pages give you the ability to form a deeper understanding of artists you’re interested in by checking out reviews written by the eMusic community of members, writers and editors, as well as related content on sites like YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr.

We also know that word-of-mouth doesn’t only happen in your local record store anymore; it happens when people introduce their friends to their favorite artists by sharing their experiences throughout a range of social networking sites, so we’ve made it easy to do so by integrating those links on our site.

Finally, we’ve added a powerful new recommendation engine that functions like your friendly music store clerk, absorbing your preferences with every action you take and offering recommendations tailored to your personal tastes.

We’re excited to bring all of these advantages together to help you discover and, in some cases, rediscover, this amazing music.

Independent labels and artists will continue to be eMusic’s core. But now more than ever, the distinction between indie and mainstream music simply does not matter – people love all sorts of music and our goal is to present all of it in a way that creates a community not only of music buyers, but of music lovers.

We do have a question though for our customers. We’ve been requested to carry major label titles for years, but we always have gone back and forth on whether it would change the fabric of eMusic. We don’t think it makes sense to exclude great artists simply because their label partner is one of four specific companies. We look to some of our favorite music — The Sex Pistols, The Clash — and we certainly never think to ourselves “Major Label.” What do you think? Do “major” and “indie” mean anything to you or is this just industry jargon?

Danny Stein
eMusic CEO and Chairman

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

Some of these rollouts have gone without a hitch. We like those. Others have had their share of hiccups, and we know it’s not an easy thing to deal with. Thanks for bearing with us. One thing we want to stress is that when we launch these new features, we are looking for your feedback; it helps to guide us, points us in certain directions, points us away from others. eMusic isn’t carved into stone. It’s a fluid product that will always be iterating, always seeking to perfect itself. Who knows how far we’ll get, but we are working to get there — wherever “there” might be.

Here’s why you are seeing today’s changes: We’ve been unhappy with the recommendations engine we’ve had on the site. Among that engine’s responsibilities were user lists on album pages (more on those in a moment!), neighbors and “Your New Arrivals.” But we thought there should be more, that new users especially would benefit from a deeper tool, a better algorithm. And so today we unveil the first stage of integration with our new recommendations engine, a group called MediaUnbound. We tested pretty much every recommendations engine on the market, and we’re very excited to be working with MediaUnbound. These are music people, and we think they make a great addition to eMusic.

Now, as I mentioned before, this likely won’t be a perfect marriage at the start. To begin with, the reason why user lists disappeared from album pages was this integration. The queries to return really kickass recommended user lists — and trust us, we use user lists all day, too — weren’t optimized, and it was slowing down the whole site. With that in mind, we made the tough call to remove them until we could make it so they didn’t cripple everything. They’re back now, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience that their disappearance might have caused. (I should mention that there’s definitely a possibility that they still might be problematic, in which case we would temporarily pull them again, but we are doing everything in our power to prevent that. One of the temporary concessions we are making is the nickname of the list creator won’t appear on the album page for now. But again, that’s just for now!)

Today’s most visible new change is the new homepage, which I freaking love. It’s a much cleaner, more sensible presentation of information, and it also let’s you see so many more albums on the homepage at once. The old homepage maxed out at about 20. This one maxes out at about 40. We like those numbers.

You will also notice a brand new dropdown menu next to the welcome message on the homepage. That let’s you browse between different album sets that we thought you might find helpful. Here’s what they are:

1) Music You’ll Love – These are the recommendations from MediaUnbound based on your history here at eMusic. These are only going to get better and better over time; they are based on your download history, your ratings, all of your on-site activity. So the more you participate, the stronger these should be! (And please note that some of the data matching is still being processed, so your recommendations will be weighted towards newer releases at first; within a few days it will reflect relevant recommendations across our entire catalog.)

2) New & Noteworthy – On the old homepage, there was a section of three to four albums at the top of the page. That’s what this is, only 28 display at once now. These are chosen by the editorial team, and reflect the best of the site. We only put stuff here if we fully stand behind it.

3) New Arrivals – This replaces “Your New Arrivals,” also from MediaUnboud. Albums added in the past 30 days recommended for you.

4) Best Sellers – Top albums from our PowerCharts.

5) New Audiobooks – I’ll give you one guess!

6) Freshly Ripped Today – Okay, try to guess this one, too!

Anyway, you get the idea. Soon you will be able to choose what you want your default data-set to be when you visit the site. Kinda hot, right?

We’ve also shifted the magazine into this Notes From the Digital Underground space, which will be a hybrid between our old magazine and 17 Dots. Same with Today’s Buzz at the bottom. Basically, we are looking at what’s worked in the past, and improving on it.

Suffice it to say there will be some bugs here. But we’re on them. We really appreciate your patience, and we are going to do our best to make it worthwhile. Remember: we want to develop and evolve eMusic into the best place on the web to find great music. We know that on a cultural and community level, that’s true. Now it’s time to make sure the technology is there, too, and we’re psyched that you’re here to experience it.

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.

First, eMusic is celebrating our tenth birthday this year. Ten years of leading the industry in selling unencumbered MP3s. Ten years of focusing on the innovative music made because someone has something to say, not because they have something to sell. Ten years of giving you, the consumer, better value in exchange for your willingness to explore and try new things.

We’ve added some of the most exciting music in years – Radiohead, My Morning Jacket, the Kompakt catalogue, our eMusic Selects picks – with even more great independent music on the way. Our audiobooks catalog has doubled in size in the last six months, and we’ve signed every major publisher except one. While MTV and Yahoo have closed down their music services, eMusic has grown by more than 60% over the past year. In the face of Amazon’s entry into the space, we have grown our market share to more than 10%.

Most importantly, you should know we haven’t slowed down. As a company we’ve worked harder on our website and our business this year than ever. So get ready – we have more new site features rolling out in the next four months than we’ve shipped in the last four years! We’re already busily preparing for a blockbuster holiday season.

So, I hope you’ll share some pride with me during our nation’s birthday celebration and Independents Day. You, more than any other music retailer’s customers, understand the value of music that transcends rules, boundaries and commercialism and we appreciate your contribution to the success of the world’s best independent music retailer. Thanks so much for making this possible.

Have a great holiday weekend.

Respectfully,

David

It is with regret that I write today to inform our loyal customers that the much-admired Epitaph record label — including the Anti and Hellcat labels — has chosen to no longer sell their catalogue on eMusic in the U.S. It sucks for all of us who have been great fans of Epitaph’s amazing artist roster, including Rancid, Bad Religion, Tom Waits, Neko Case, the Frames, Dropkick Murphys, and countless other key punk and alt-rock staples. For more than 20 years, Brett Gurewitz has built a fantastic, artist-friendly home.

As many of you know, Epitaph has been a notable supporter of eMusic for many years, back to when eMusic was just beginning. Unfortunately for all of us, they have decided that we can only continue to sell their music to you if they receive the same amount per track that they receive from iTunes. This would require us to charge you 99 cents (or more) a song in order to pay for things like our editors and curators, bandwidth and the other costs necessary to run our business. Obviously, charging you a dollar a song is not something we’re comfortable doing.

At a time when the music industry is in such steep decline, our research and experience shows us that consumers are still willing to buy music, provided the value is right. And 99 cents a song is not an acceptable price point for all consumers. That’s one reason why eMusic exists and has been so successful; those consumers who are willing to spend more on music (provided the price is right) do so with us. You spend more than 14 times as much as the average iTunes customer at a time when per capita spending on all music and audio is under $24. You buy twenty times more music than the average iTunes customer.

We know that consumers seeking good value don’t have to buy CDs for $16 or buy downloads for $1 each. They simply go to Amazon and eBay and buy used Epitaph CDs for $3 each. When consumers buy used CDs, as you know, the artist and label don’t get paid at all. Some analysts have estimated that as much as 30% of Amazon’s music business comes from selling used CDs. With facts like these, it’s hard to argue that we, as an industry, can control the price of music. You, the consumers, make that decision and you are telling us what we need to know — you’ll buy more if you can pay less.

On the digital side, those of us trying to build successful retail business have to compete not just with the incredibly successful used CD market, but with the free pirate market as well, where every one of the 2.8 million tracks we carry are a click away from being downloaded for free as DRM-free MP3s any day of the week. Artists and labels don’t make any money on those, either. And the piracy “market” dwarfs the legit market by more than twenty to one in downloads, every day.

So, we are terribly sad to see Epitaph go, not just for our customers, but for their artists as well, who will no longer have a chance to sell their music to our more than 300,000 loyal customers, many of whom represent some of the most prolific music consumers left in America and Europe. With the industry’s declines continuing, we think any retailer showing signs of success should probably be a place where all artists want their music sold.

We will miss Epitaph and their ground-breaking artists. And so will our customers. We would welcome them back any time, and are hopeful they will have a change of heart. In the meantime, if you want them to know your thoughts, feel free to contact them here. We’re always happy to read your thoughts as well, so feel free to post them below. And if you’re in a letter-writing mood, be sure to let your favorite labels among the 20,000 we carry know that you like buying their music on eMusic.

Thank you for your continued support,

David Pakman
President & CEO, eMusic

Tony Wilson, record label owner, journalist, nightclub entrepreneur and much much more, has died, leaving a hole in the lives of his family and friends, the cultural life of Britain and the music scene worldwide. Wilson died yesterday (August 10th) in Manchester’s Christie Hospital from complications arising from kidney cancer. He was 57.

Tony Wilson is not a man to be remembered in a hospital bed; his life was characterised by energy and wild enthusiasm. He was a passionate music lover, a chaotic label manager, a talented journalist, a “self-confessed wanker,” a proud Mancunian and the best kind of English eccentric.

Amongst music fans, he’s best known as the founder of Factory Records, the label that gave us Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio and Durutti Column. Factory was undoubtedly mismanaged, as much through idealism as incompetence. But it was a glorious, blazing label, fueled by passion and a real, excitable love for music. He insisted the artists, not the label owned the rights to everything they did and was rumoured to have written the early contracts in his own blood (he never dispelled any gossip, stating that myth was probably better than reality.) He, along with New Order and their manager and Factory partner Rob Gretton, opened the Hacienda; one of the great British nightclubs, responsible for spreading house music throughout this country and getting a generation onto the dancefloor. ESG, Cabaret Voltaire and New Order played the opening night and Madonna played her first ever British gig there.

Wilson, along with his wife, the former Miss UK Yvette Livesey, also set up the annual music conference In The City in 1992. The conference broke some of the UK’s best known acts, including Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead, Oasis and Pulp. Throughout all of this musical mayhem, he continued to work at his original career, journalism: for local Manchester company Granada Television and for the BBC.

Like eMusic, Wilson was a true believer in the independent music scene. Factory Records, with it’s commitment to artists and passion for cripplingly expensive yet beautiful design, was Wilson’s way of trying to make a difference, a new dawn for the music industry. He was also one of the first to set up a legal download service, Music 33, in 1999. He was a visionary and a maniac, sometimes wildly over-confident, but determined that there must be a better way to do things.

I saw Wilson in the flesh a handful of times, at gigs and in the lobbies of magazine offices. I spoke to him twice. Once was via email, wanting his input for a piece on ESG. Throughout his response he mis-spelled the name of producer Martin Hannet as Martian. Given Hannet’s well-documented eccentricities, I couldn’t quite be sure if this was a genuine typo or a wilful non-error. The second time he was interviewing me. The Hacienda building was about to be demolished and turned into, no surprise, luxury flats. At the time I was employed by Mixmag, a leading UK club culture magazine and Wilson, in his role as a Granada Television journalist, was speaking to London-based me via satellite from Manchester. I waited alone in a small room; all of a sudden his voice flooded my headphones.
“Just before we go on air,” he said. “What do you really think of all this?”
“It’s a terrible shame; actually it’s a bloody disgrace!” I said.
“Exactly Anna, exactly. I loved the Hac. Anyway, live in three.”
From then on in he was all professionalism, whereas I was a nervous wreck, after all TONY WILSON had just called me by my name, like we’d known each other for years.

I never made it to Tony’s beloved Hac, being not quite 18 and looking younger when the doors shut for the last time. But I’ve always been a bit of a Factory girl and my life would be much poorer without ‘Bizarre Love Triangle,’ ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Step On;’ without many of the artists he promoted, without seeing Peter Saville’s wonderful graphics and without knowing he was out there, strident and funny, staking out a corner of the musical world that was forever Manchester.

Nice one Tony, you played a blinder.

For more about Factory Records on eMusic, read Joe Keyes’ Factory Records Dozen.

As eMusic’s CEO David Pakman noted in his 17 Dots post about the future of DRM-free music, eMusic is a music retailer. Our job is to provide consumers with an easy, pleasant and affordable way to help people purchase music that they like, thereby supporting the artists who create music and the labels who distribute it. The key to this exchange perhaps more than any other is discovery: people need to be able to find ways to download the music that they like. Without proper venues of discovery and access, music would die. How else would we find stuff that we like?

There are many ways to discover artists, and one of the biggest is in serious danger. We are speaking, of course, about internet radio, one of the most vital ways for music consumers to discover music that they love. Due to a decision by the Copyright Royalties Board that will increase the cost of running an internet radio station anywhere from 300 to 1200 percent, its future is in serious doubt. Yesterday, Save Net Radio organized a national Day of Silence to raise awareness about this potentially disastrous decision. Here’s how they describe it:

The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!). To protest these rates and encourage the millions of net radio listeners to take action and contact their Congressional representatives, today is a national Day of Silence. Webcasters across the country have dedicated this day to increasing awareness of this looming threat and gathering support for the SaveNetRadio collation and our campaign to preserve music diversity on-line. For an updated list of the participants in this national day of silence, visit http://www.kurthanson.com/dos/. Net radio listeners, please excuse the interruption of your normal programming and take action to ensure this silence is not permanent. Call your Congressional Representatives today.

Everything from Pandora to SomaFM will be seriously hurt by the decision. Here’s what Pandora founder Tim Westergren had to say on his company’s site:

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay to stream songs. Pandora’s fees will triple, and are retroactive for eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

A bill called the “Internet Radio Equality Act” has already been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet radio — and Pandora — from obliteration.

In light of all of this, eMusic has made donations to Save Net Radio, KEXP, SomaFM and KCRW to help in this fight, as well as to support some of our favorite internet radio stations. But the real onus is on each of us music fans to call their congressional representative and ask them to pass the Internet Radio Equality Act. You can find your own representative here.

This is not a bunch of Chicken Little-ing. This is a real and urgent problem that will go into effect July 15th, and without the votes in place, one of the best ways to discover music will die. Please do your part and call your representative today.

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