Well, to be fair, it's aimed at people who have dedicated T1 lines, 2048x1028px monitors, multiple-core CPUs, high-end graphics cards with multiple GPUs, and one particular browser/OS/Java version combination which they're almost certainly not going to tell us.
This made me laugh.
Glad to see the daily freebie is still working for nonsubscribers!
Off-topic, but has anyone else noticed these days people are always writing "web sight"? I've said it before and I'll say it again, this whole Internet thing just isn't working out.
Doofy, maybe they're trying to recreate Les Paul's famous "log" guitar in that clip.
I'm just glad my refresh isn't for a couple of weeks yet, because we all know how this will go - more of the same excuses, BS, "we're working on it", blah blah blah. They won't go back, because they don't understand that there's a problem in the first place. I vented over there and now I'm just going to leave it be. Otherwise it's just a black hole of energy vampirism.
I'm going to try focusing my attention in new directions - I was really stoked yesterday to find 2 albums, Kinks and Kinda Kinks, over at Amazon - old stuff that isn't available digitally, and these are Import albums with bonus tracks, 20 something tracks each, each for $6 something - they're coming from England from another seller so no free shipping, but even with that both are still a total of $19.11, which is pretty darn good. Got to make hay where the sun shines, so screw eMusic and their new little dark cloud and dismal graphics.
I think I feel used CDs in my future too possibly.
Edit - OK, I couldn't resist venting a little more sarcasm over there.
@ Doofy, the emusic twitter staff have spent the afternoon tweeting at everyone to please "bare with us". I really didn't ask them to put that image in my head on top of everything else.
the emusic twitter staff have spent the afternoon tweeting at everyone to please "bare with us". I really didn't ask them to put that image in my head on top of everything else.
Sitting here laughing. Every time I read that "bare," I was annoyed, but the visual did not occur to me. That has made it all "bareable." Thanks for the laugh.
Over on the eMu boards I wrote that I'll probably unsubscribe soon (once I spend my last $6 or so), but since then, I've been playing around a little bit, and I've figured out how to get rid of the big banners at the top of the New Releases listing pages, at least in Firefox.
First, you need a plugin called "Stylish." This lets you merge your own CSS into web pages on a site-specific basis, and override element definitions if necessary. Once installed, go to any album/browse URL (doesn't matter what genre, etc.):
There should be an "S" icon for Stylish on the left side of your Firefox Add-On toolbar. Left-click on that, choose "Write style," and in the submenu that pops up, choose "Blank style." That should bring up the style editor, into which you'd paste this CSS text:
The "!important" is what overrides the existing style definition with (in this case) the property that's being changed. Click "Preview" to see if it worked, and if so, save the style (with an appropriate name) and you're done!
Bear in mind that once they see this forum post, they might try to defeat this technique somehow (probably with post-pageload JavaScript). Normally I wouldn't risk telling folks about it because of that, but since I'm probably still going to cancel anyway, I figured why not... Hopefully they won't care, because the only people willing to go to this much trouble are likely to be long-term subscribers who are also the most likely to complain about huge banners. So maybe this will reduce their volume of complaints.
Kind of impressive how screwed up things still are over there after the weekend. Also the mayhem on the messboard--you would think they'd recognize at some point that they have a problem these outbreaks of mass disaffection among their customers.
I wanted to see what that poster's download history says, but apparently that feature of eMusic is currently broken. Either that or he's never downloaded anything.
I'm really curious what I'm supposed to listen to my music on so as not to be a "Stepford Hipster".
I wondered that too. Perhaps he plays his mp3's on a Victrola, or a Zune.
Also, given that there are 100 million plus iTunes customers, this is as if to say, I don't want to be one of those elitist phonies who eat at McDonald's or drink Diet Coke. Furthermore, how does using iTunes put you into "contact" with any human being on the face of the Earth?
Anyway, my main point was, eMusic is still remarkably broken, at least the features I tried. Also surprised at how much I miss 'Recommended for You,' I think I checked it pretty much every time I visited the site. Also hesitant to try DL'ing anything...daily DL not working because of login loop.
I've been downloading OK today with no problems at all. But I am still finding it far more difficuly getting around the site to find music. GP summed up the reasons behind this over there really well. It seems to me that it is now much more geared to people who know what chart music they want.
Just been reading the message board over there. One thing that sticks out to me is the number of names I do not recognise - members who do not normally contribute to the discussions, perhaps even more so than last year's changes. I do not understand why it was not fully tested before being used. It just would not happen at, say, itunes or Amazon, Emusic is not at their level yet, or anywhere near it.
I can download OK (when I can find something) but still see NOTHING under Freshly Ripped, Genres or Charts. I know people were complaining about those not being filtered or in date order, but I haven't had anything there for days.
I'm not covinced we have had any Freshly Ripped for a few days - it is easier to 'hide' this with no date added now. For example, on the message board we get a daily list of new releases in Europe from Dhaun, using Mutantis' scripts, but none have been added for a couple of days or so.
One thing that sticks out to me is the number of names I do not recognise - members who do not normally contribute to the discussions, perhaps even more so than last year's changes.
I noticed that too. One regular poster criticizing the "hysteria" complained about the "messageboard mafia" but I think it's fair to say that apart from a few regular names, it's a different mafia every time. I wonder is this reservoir of potentially angry customers being replenished continually, or is it gradually being drained, leaving nothing but a large puddle of subscribers who'll put up with any old shit?
i'd guess the former. there have been 400K subscribers for a few years now. how many contribute to the boards? even if you assume they represent others, and even if you include comments made on other sites -- e.g., twitter and facebook -- it's still a tiny fraction of the subscriber base.
Something to keep in mind, is just because only a small fraction of the member base complains on the forum doesn't mean that the non-participants aren't equally pissed. I was just stunned by a post I saw on the AAJ forum on an emusic thread. A long time member of both AAJ and emusic alike posted that he hated the new design so much and related problems that he just up and quit.
What's remarkable about this, is he was an emu member near or at the Connoisseur level for years and years. He was spending something like eighty bucks a month with emu. And when emu had each of their price increases (the first, a price increase, the second, a download decrease), he didn't even blink. He said, well, I don't like getting less for my money, but I'm still getting a great deal, so I'm staying.
With their design change, emu managed to do what two price increases couldn't... they pissed off one of their best customers so much that he left without a second thought.
He doesn't participate on the forum and if he hadn't said something about it on the AAJ forum, no one would've ever known.
So, it ain't accurate to assume that just because people there is a large percentage of the emu subscriber base who aren't showing their displeasure on the forum, it doesn't mean that they aren't as enraged as those who are expressing it on the forum.
If anything, I would argue that people displaying their rage on the forum probably care more for the site and, thus, are likely to be more loyal customers.
Me, most places, they piss me off and I just leave without a sound, never to return. I think a lot of people are like that, would just as soon as wash their hands of a bad situation than log into a forum and make a post.
I didn't post my goodbye. My connection with the message board had ended a few months before I quit. I have been back to look at it twice -- both times since this new FUBAR. I read a couple of posts, and that was enough. I had hoped to see the post from our emuser that was amusing (something about 74?), but there were so many -- two pages of threads for that day, plus so many comments on several threads, that I didn't want to spend the time to find it.
I will never understand how they can be so cavalier about changes that don't work, let alone dropping the changes on their customers without having ensured that the transition will be smooth.
The other thing with the response to the changes this time round is that now the changes affect the very operation of the site itself. Previous changes have been to do with pricing or a change of focus, but what's causing the uproar now is a massive technical screwup that's actually removed a huge amount of the site's functionality (not least: the ability to download!). It's one thing to make the site more expensive, it's something else entirely to make it worse.
I suspect that the message board response this time round may be much more representative of the general feeling, compared with, say, the Sony situation, because while it's perfectly normal to not care about the indie/major divide, people generally fall on only one side of the able to find and download music/unable to find and download music divide.
True, a few people are applauding the new design but their support doesn't seem to extend beyond "it looks cool", and I don't think anyone's prepared to admit that their "music discovery" has been enhanced.
I believe this is enough for me to overcome the inertia, anyway. I was mostly hanging around there for the new Kate Bush album, which (to me at least) turns out to be something of a disappointment, though I'll probably buy it regardless... In any event, it's $8.24 on eMu and $4.99 on amazon.com, at least for today, and I only have $6.85 left on eMu. So I'm thinking I'll just grab an album or a couple of EP's from the SFL, say "Sayonara," and dump a few bucks into the ol' Paypal account for Bandcamp and Amazon stuff.
I have to admit a bit embarrassedly that I'm not really experiencing any problems with the new site. I downloaded a couple albums today with almost no problem (on one, it did give me the big fail, but I immediately retried and it worked like a charm). I can search on whomever I want. Sometimes the album art doesn't refresh right away, but I just hit the button again and it pops up.
On the initial day of the changeover, I did get into that re-login loop, but nothing like that today.
I've always been able to search, except once or twice when it wouldn't even open the search box up for me to type in, but that went away after a quick screen change.
I like the dark background. The glare of white screen fucks with my eyes, and it often triggers migraines if I don't have the brightness all the way down.
I'm using a Mac (Leopard), Firefox (probably the most recent version or damn close), and a really old version of the emu downloader.
I'm pretty sure that now that I'm posting this, then next button I click on the emu site will cause my computer to explode.
Cheers.
P.S. I'm putting together my rec right now. It's shaping up that I'll be using the phrase "Highly recommended" more than any of the three previous articles I've contributed to.
I put my account on Hold this morning - I couldn't even access the Account page last night to do it then. I'm down to $0.29 booster leftover that's good until February, and the Hold goes into effect in 2 weeks. First time in all my pissedoffedness of the last several years I have been driven this far, but the site is so FUBAR at this point it is a complete waste. If they get the thing running again my focus will be on my multiple SFLs, which are in a sense notebooks of sorts of things I'm interested in but some of which I have no intention of ever buying (Haydn's complete operas) except if they're on sale (or used CDs maybe, etc.), and clearing out the things from them, especially cheap ones, I really want. There are still a number of those $4.40 specials I want, but a lot of other stuff is just going into the trashbin, maybe along with the whole site. They have really screwed the pooch this time.
I think you're right. And that it would be nice to see these points posted over yonder too.
And I've only had some of the technical difficulties reported (can search and download at the moment, though some results lead nowhere - whole labels are missing). I don;t like the grey too much but it's not a huge deal. To me the bigger deal is all the ways in which the new design is just harder to navigate (I've been posting on that over there, won't repeat here). There are quite a number of tasks that are now more clicks and more scrolling and less-easy scanning.
but their support doesn't seem to extend beyond "it looks cool",
This is one of my theories about the whole thing. They had screenshots up on a beta page a little while back, and most of the comments there on the day I looked seemed positive. But that's a reaction to what the front page looks like, not feedback on usability (it's one thing to think the front page looks snappy, another, for instance, to scroll down past the same banner ad for the tenth time in the same browsing session). I was wondering this morning if there are a bunch of shell-shocked people over there who collected lots of encouraging feedback from folk who thought it looked cool based on screenshots and are now stunned that so many people seem to hate it. (Of course finding that it doesn't actually work will tend to sour one's reaction to the aesthetics). Then another part of me is wondering: if they thought they were onto a really good thing, why no fanfare before the roll-out? Maybe because they were not that confident it would work? Who knows.
I was thinking about posting the above on the forum, but, one, there's so much there it just seems like it'd get lost in the crowd, two, it almost feels like piling on at this point and the thought of adding one more post to that huge list poor Noah has to read through every day just didn't sit right with me, and three (and also a bit embarrassing), while I'm not an emusic employee per se (strictly independent contractor), I'll admit to some cautious discretion about what I post there. While I certainly won't be a dishonest cheerleader and make pro-site comments that I don't agree with, but I also think I'll refrain from making any comment that isn't purely constructive criticism. Now, I do, in fact, think that it's important for emusic to know about the above example of the long-time member leaving, and it's why I almost posted it there, but a combination of all three reasons in this post had me change my mind and not post anything there.
I think, overall, I was concerned that my post would be used as anecdotal proof in the debate over whether forum posters are representative of general site opinion, as opposed to being used as constructive criticism to better accurately measure the negative effect the site changes have caused. Besides, I think they know that there's problems, so my one bit of anecdotal material, ultimately, wouldn't change anything. Emu knows they have a mess to clean up and they know that people aren't happy.
@ jonahpwll, I totally understand all of that, and you're probably right. As you were. I was carried away by reading a thoughtful post on the topic that wasn't "they are all haters and whiners" or "emusic sucks" :-)
Comments
This made me laugh.
Glad to see the daily freebie is still working for nonsubscribers!
I'm just glad my refresh isn't for a couple of weeks yet, because we all know how this will go - more of the same excuses, BS, "we're working on it", blah blah blah. They won't go back, because they don't understand that there's a problem in the first place. I vented over there and now I'm just going to leave it be. Otherwise it's just a black hole of energy vampirism.
I'm going to try focusing my attention in new directions - I was really stoked yesterday to find 2 albums, Kinks and Kinda Kinks, over at Amazon - old stuff that isn't available digitally, and these are Import albums with bonus tracks, 20 something tracks each, each for $6 something - they're coming from England from another seller so no free shipping, but even with that both are still a total of $19.11, which is pretty darn good. Got to make hay where the sun shines, so screw eMusic and their new little dark cloud and dismal graphics.
I think I feel used CDs in my future too possibly.
Edit - OK, I couldn't resist venting a little more sarcasm over there.
I take it back, this guy's history of Contemporary Records and Shelly Manne's "Checkmate" album justifies the entire existence of the Internet.
Sitting here laughing. Every time I read that "bare," I was annoyed, but the visual did not occur to me. That has made it all "bareable." Thanks for the laugh.
First, you need a plugin called "Stylish." This lets you merge your own CSS into web pages on a site-specific basis, and override element definitions if necessary. Once installed, go to any album/browse URL (doesn't matter what genre, etc.):
http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/browse/album/classical/new-music
There should be an "S" icon for Stylish on the left side of your Firefox Add-On toolbar. Left-click on that, choose "Write style," and in the submenu that pops up, choose "Blank style." That should bring up the style editor, into which you'd paste this CSS text:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document url-prefix("http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/browse/album") { .big-stage { height: 1px !important; } }The "!important" is what overrides the existing style definition with (in this case) the property that's being changed. Click "Preview" to see if it worked, and if so, save the style (with an appropriate name) and you're done!
Bear in mind that once they see this forum post, they might try to defeat this technique somehow (probably with post-pageload JavaScript). Normally I wouldn't risk telling folks about it because of that, but since I'm probably still going to cancel anyway, I figured why not... Hopefully they won't care, because the only people willing to go to this much trouble are likely to be long-term subscribers who are also the most likely to complain about huge banners. So maybe this will reduce their volume of complaints.
@-moz-document url-prefix("http://www.emusic.com/browse/album")My guess is you'll probably have to make a separate (but otherwise duplicate) style for that, assuming it works.
Also, amusingly,
Hipsters just can't catch a break on that board.
I'm really curious what I'm supposed to listen to my music on so as not to be a "Stepford Hipster".
Craig
Also, given that there are 100 million plus iTunes customers, this is as if to say, I don't want to be one of those elitist phonies who eat at McDonald's or drink Diet Coke. Furthermore, how does using iTunes put you into "contact" with any human being on the face of the Earth?
Anyway, my main point was, eMusic is still remarkably broken, at least the features I tried. Also surprised at how much I miss 'Recommended for You,' I think I checked it pretty much every time I visited the site. Also hesitant to try DL'ing anything...daily DL not working because of login loop.
What's remarkable about this, is he was an emu member near or at the Connoisseur level for years and years. He was spending something like eighty bucks a month with emu. And when emu had each of their price increases (the first, a price increase, the second, a download decrease), he didn't even blink. He said, well, I don't like getting less for my money, but I'm still getting a great deal, so I'm staying.
With their design change, emu managed to do what two price increases couldn't... they pissed off one of their best customers so much that he left without a second thought.
He doesn't participate on the forum and if he hadn't said something about it on the AAJ forum, no one would've ever known.
So, it ain't accurate to assume that just because people there is a large percentage of the emu subscriber base who aren't showing their displeasure on the forum, it doesn't mean that they aren't as enraged as those who are expressing it on the forum.
If anything, I would argue that people displaying their rage on the forum probably care more for the site and, thus, are likely to be more loyal customers.
Me, most places, they piss me off and I just leave without a sound, never to return. I think a lot of people are like that, would just as soon as wash their hands of a bad situation than log into a forum and make a post.
I will never understand how they can be so cavalier about changes that don't work, let alone dropping the changes on their customers without having ensured that the transition will be smooth.
I suspect that the message board response this time round may be much more representative of the general feeling, compared with, say, the Sony situation, because while it's perfectly normal to not care about the indie/major divide, people generally fall on only one side of the able to find and download music/unable to find and download music divide.
True, a few people are applauding the new design but their support doesn't seem to extend beyond "it looks cool", and I don't think anyone's prepared to admit that their "music discovery" has been enhanced.
Just as well, really!
On the initial day of the changeover, I did get into that re-login loop, but nothing like that today.
I've always been able to search, except once or twice when it wouldn't even open the search box up for me to type in, but that went away after a quick screen change.
I like the dark background. The glare of white screen fucks with my eyes, and it often triggers migraines if I don't have the brightness all the way down.
I'm using a Mac (Leopard), Firefox (probably the most recent version or damn close), and a really old version of the emu downloader.
I'm pretty sure that now that I'm posting this, then next button I click on the emu site will cause my computer to explode.
Cheers.
P.S. I'm putting together my rec right now. It's shaping up that I'll be using the phrase "Highly recommended" more than any of the three previous articles I've contributed to.
And I've only had some of the technical difficulties reported (can search and download at the moment, though some results lead nowhere - whole labels are missing). I don;t like the grey too much but it's not a huge deal. To me the bigger deal is all the ways in which the new design is just harder to navigate (I've been posting on that over there, won't repeat here). There are quite a number of tasks that are now more clicks and more scrolling and less-easy scanning.
@Nereffid This is one of my theories about the whole thing. They had screenshots up on a beta page a little while back, and most of the comments there on the day I looked seemed positive. But that's a reaction to what the front page looks like, not feedback on usability (it's one thing to think the front page looks snappy, another, for instance, to scroll down past the same banner ad for the tenth time in the same browsing session). I was wondering this morning if there are a bunch of shell-shocked people over there who collected lots of encouraging feedback from folk who thought it looked cool based on screenshots and are now stunned that so many people seem to hate it. (Of course finding that it doesn't actually work will tend to sour one's reaction to the aesthetics). Then another part of me is wondering: if they thought they were onto a really good thing, why no fanfare before the roll-out? Maybe because they were not that confident it would work? Who knows.
I was thinking about posting the above on the forum, but, one, there's so much there it just seems like it'd get lost in the crowd, two, it almost feels like piling on at this point and the thought of adding one more post to that huge list poor Noah has to read through every day just didn't sit right with me, and three (and also a bit embarrassing), while I'm not an emusic employee per se (strictly independent contractor), I'll admit to some cautious discretion about what I post there. While I certainly won't be a dishonest cheerleader and make pro-site comments that I don't agree with, but I also think I'll refrain from making any comment that isn't purely constructive criticism. Now, I do, in fact, think that it's important for emusic to know about the above example of the long-time member leaving, and it's why I almost posted it there, but a combination of all three reasons in this post had me change my mind and not post anything there.
I think, overall, I was concerned that my post would be used as anecdotal proof in the debate over whether forum posters are representative of general site opinion, as opposed to being used as constructive criticism to better accurately measure the negative effect the site changes have caused. Besides, I think they know that there's problems, so my one bit of anecdotal material, ultimately, wouldn't change anything. Emu knows they have a mess to clean up and they know that people aren't happy.
Anyways, that was my thinking.