Broken routine, now broker

jonahpwll

New artist and/or new album, hop on over to Lala to give it a listen before going off in search of where best to buy it from. Not any more.

First stop on the purchase trail, Amie St. Not any more.

I just discovered a band called "I Am Robot and Proud". I tried to log into Amie to see if I could buy it there. I can't.

Also, Neil Halstead's Myspace page gave my work computer a virus. Y'know that little pop-up window that hits after the third song on the playlist? This time, before I could close it out, adware and viruses and bullshit hits my computer. Sucks. I used to use myspace to research new music. Not any more.

Why they gotta make it so hard?

cafreema

The only thing keeping me from being pissed off about the current state of online music downloads is Guvera, and it's only a matter of time until all those freebies stop showing up every day. That will be a sad day.

Then we have the eMu relaunch and the unknown repercussions of it to look...forward?...to.

Sigh.

Craig

brittleblood

hmmm - i'm on stand-by over at emu. anything of note going on over there?

frogkopf

In a way, I'm kind of relieved. When I look back at the last couple of years, I think about all the the time I've spent acquiring music as opposed to actually enjoying it. With Amie Street, I kept telling myself, ok next month I'll cut back and listen to more and buy less. I was starting to feel like one of those twitter/facebook junkies that had to log in every couple of hours to check my status and the postings.

I did the math, and if I listen to 3 albums a day, I will be lucky to get through them twice all within my remaining lifespan. Time to kick back and enjoy life.....

NankerP

Cheer up, jonahpwll -- just pretend you live in Australia and you could never use Lala ... but you have decent coffee to make up for it.

Katrina

When I quit eMusic, I felt that sense of loss. Now I'm used to it....kinda. I still get their freebie of the day, Amazon's freebies, and iTunes freebies.
I am STILL working through over 2500 unlistened tracks.


myspace, or at least Neil Halstead's Myspace page, sucks! Bummer that happened. Do you have to get rid of the malware, or is a handy IT person going to do it for you?

There are certain sites and emails I just don't open unless I'm on my Mac. If the Mac ever breaks I guess I'll save those sites for the library PCs.

If Spotify comes to the USA, I'm doomed.

kargatron

Jonah, you should consider an napster subscription. Only $5 a month to mostly replicate the lala sampling experience (pros: unlimited streaming, some mp3 credits, inexpensive -- cons: more catalog holes than lala (ime), slightly worse interface, not free). I find it a reasonable value among available alternatives.

cafreema

68 - All we know is that they are apparently adding Universal and EMI sometime in November and relaunching the site with far less emphasis on free nps to attract new subscribers. They also seem to be getting rid of disloyalty bonuses and when the news of the relaunch started leaking out the bonus for signing up for an annual went away. Finally, reading between the lines on a post by CathyHN I'm fully expecting a price hike, but I don't know how much.

Craig

thomnottom

If there's another price hike on eMu, why would anybody stick with them? I guess for some of the more obscure stuff it'll still be cheaper, but so many digital albums are in the $5.99 - $7.99 range at Amazon regularly it's not even close to the bargain it once was.

I realize that a lot of stuff may still be cheaper there, but it's significantly harder to figure out. And let's face it, their customer service is a crap shoot compared to a place like Amazon. If an album is only $0.50 cheaper and I have to take out a calculator to figure that out, why stick with the subscription model?

I'm sure there's one (or two) guy(s) over there ridiculously excited that they'll be able to pay more money to get music from eMu that they used to have to go somewhere else so that they could pay more money for it, but I seriously doubt it's going to help their shrinking customer base. Remember, they used to have over 400k subscribers and have said that it's dropped in the 20k-40k range since the Sony acquisition.

Didn't realize that the bonus for annual subscriptions went away. Oh well, there goes that idea.

elwoodicious

What I like about eMu is that it's geared towards discovery. It's a place to dig, discover, and learn; you can start with a label, genre, artist and just wander the associations. I have yet to find that anywhere else. Amie Street was great on price comparisons but their search and cataloging left much to be desired, mTracks sort of comes close but the UX is clunky and awkward.

A price hike might bring eMu in line with Amazon's pricing but Amazon has always been a place you go to when you know exactly what you are looking for, it has never really been a place to browse and discover unless you are looking for whether or not people bought Trojans, beef jerky, and duct tape with the latest Interpol. I suppose at the end of the day I'm paying eMusic to entertain and educate me as well as give me a place to take a risk on albums without the associated buyer anxiety that the other services seem to deliver.

thomnottom

Once my annual plan ran out and eMu became a sporadic endeavor, I stopped using it as a place of discovery. Now most of what I find comes from this board and a few blogs (including 17 Dots). Then it's a matter of figuring out where to buy it. The label searching on eMu is probably the best, but the genre search has never been useful for me. Either too generic (Bjork is Rock/Pop? gee, thanks) or completely wrong (once again, Bjork is Rock/Pop?). I'd also say that Amazon's "customers also bought" section is at least as good, if not better, than eMusic's. It only really falls apart when you happen to be grabbing freebies. I do wish they would add the ability to search by labels.

Perhaps it's just the rising cost of dealing with eMusic that makes me tune out their suggestions more and more. Over the past few months I found myself exploring Amie Street the way I used to explore eMusic. Maybe there were more deadends, but my cart filled up rapidly while my SFL on eMu remained empty.

Doofy

We are about to find out whether there's any life in the subscription model or not. Obviously there needs to be a substantial price break for subscribers...otherwise there's no inducement to subscribe. I guess what I'm hoping is, with the new labels presumably bringing the selection up to Amazon/iTunes levels, eMu will be able to attract ala carte customers, some of whom will become subscribers. This is similar to what Limewire Store is attempting, I doubt with much success. If the subscription option goes away, then difficult to see why we would need eMu in addition to the other options that exist.

I hope they do survive...I certainly haven't run out of things to explore, and I find my basic-level sub as an economical way to get a steady flow of fresh music. One thing's for sure, I have gotten significant "entertainment value" by exploring on eMu, through recs, user lists, and the messboard. Amie was OK for that too, although the high percentage of amateurish content was a limiting factor.

Bad Thoughts

I do wish they would add the ability to search by labels.

You can search what labels have here, but you can't search for labels themselves.

elwoodicious

@Bad Thoughts, what would be more meaningful would be a navigation system that allows you to walk across albums-labels-artists-albums much like eMusic does. That search page reminds me of the absolute horrid OLS system that my town library uses that coughs back irrelevant results no matter how targeted your search happens to be. :-/

brittleblood

emusic is - and now was - pretty good for discovery - not just because of its search/sample functions - but the community was pretty tight. on a subscription model - everyone had a reason to return a bunch of times during the month. and they'd build playlists and threads such as the "punish me" format allowing you to sycophant off folks like brighter, plong, etc. with the trashing of the community by the slow metamorphosis into an apple store, emusic has to deal solely on its search/sample functions. and i think we're in agreement "at least they're not as bad as X, but they could be a lot better if they simply instituted Y"...and this crowd...um hipsters...that just doesn't play well. we're just NOT the kind of folks who say "what a wonderful thanksgiving! we should be so thankful we're not like those folks whose basement flooded."

kargatron

Since I mentioned napster above, I just wanted to note two new discoveries - that much of ECM's catalog is available for streaming, and, definitely new and welcome, you can finally browse/click on labels.

Katrina

Ya know,having had to buy yet another drive for backing up mp3 files and spending way too mcuh time making sure everthing is perfect, Napster is looking better and better.
Maybe I don't need to own everything. I could buy a song I really liked.


I've been selling my crap on eBay and my books to 1/2 price books. Those 300 vinyls? Maybe they should go to someone who would actually do soemthing besides dust them

kargatron

I think of napster as "on-demand streaming", rather than the odd "renting music" angle I see some people mention. It's purely a supplement to my own library - I use it primarily for full-length sampling and single listens to unowned-albums - nothing close to my primary listening method.

CaptainWrong

I'm pretty much counting on my annual subscription's end being the end of my relationship with eMusic. The per album cost is already very close to buying a physical copy used and I'm counting on a price hike which pushes it over this line. I've got Napster and thinking about upgrading so I can use it on my iPhone. That alone is starting to make me question my continued support of eMusic but just know this relaunch is going to be the final straw. Sad to be so negative but after they cocked up the Sony thing, I have very little confidence in the brand anymore.

hoosfoos

Katrina said:

Ya know,having had to buy yet another drive for backing up mp3 files and spending way too mcuh time making sure everthing is perfect, Napster is looking better and better. Maybe I don't need to own everything. I could buy a song I really liked.

I've been wondering this too. With the shift from CDs to MP3, I got used to the concept of not having to own a physical copy. Now with MP3s, I wonder if I really need to own the music files. Would a streaming service where I could listen to about anything be ok? I wonder how it would change my listening habits. Instead of trying to narrow down to 10 or so albums per month, how would I choose what to listen to given a much bigger universe of possibilities?

I agree on spending way too much time managing my MP3 collection with all tagging, renaming, backing up, transferring so I can listen to it at work, making MP3 CDs to listen to in the car, keeping my Squeezebox up to date so I can listen to my latest music in the living room. CDs were a lot easier. Even though MP3's are cheaper than CDs and lets you acquire more music, you make up the price with your time.

Dr. Mutex

@elwoodicious: Underneath most of those horrendous library web-based search pages is a Z39.50 search interface trying to get out. My library offers this under "advanced search". If yours doesn't you may be able to sneak in the back door via The Library of Congress' Z39.50 gateway. Scroll down to find the list of institutions you can query.

@kragatron, Katina: I've been trying to convince myself I don't need to own the music for a while now. It's not working.

kargatron

I hope I didn't give anyone the impression I am sloughing off ownership - not only do I acknowledge the endowment effect (another cognitive bias, one that induces higher valuation of possessed things), I embrace it heartily!