@Nereffid, I was wondering how you were doing just the other day.might we see any more of the history of classical music? it's been educating me so far.
I sincerely hope to get back to that soon. I've had too much going on over the past year but I might find more time for it now. If the next part doesn't appear by the end of October you'll need to talk severely to me.
List of "top 50 labels" posted. Hadn't thought about Rhino being affected, ouch
Columbia
Decca
RCA Records Label
Decca International
Sony Classical
Sony Music Entertainment
Rhino Atlantic
Rhino/Warner Bros.
Geffen
Capitol Records
Ultra Records, LLC
Epic
Nervous Records
Warner Bros.
Sony Music Latin
DG
Rhino
Columbia/Legacy
Ariola
Atlantic Records
Legacy Recordings
New Rounder
Fantasy Records
Deutsche Grammophon
Sony BMG Music Entertainment
PLG UK Classics
Blue Note Records
Verve Records
Rhino/Elektra
ECM
Word Records
Parlophone UK
Sparrow
ISLAND RECORDS
Universal Latino
Virgin Records
RCA Red Seal
Capitol Latin
Integrity/Columbia
Jive
Fonovisa
A&M
WM Spain
Nonesuch
Reprise
Walt Disney Records
Defected Records
Interscope
Motown
Roadrunner Records
Can't summon much patience for the "emusic should drop its prices" comments at the other place, somehow. Most of the stuff that is not leaving is already very cheap. If folk complain that it is indie music at mainstream prices (whcih it isn't) is that not implying mainstream music is actually better and should cost more? (A proposition that I find hard to digest).
GP: I wouldn't say that emusic should lower prices or that indie music is worth less, but, they lost me by raising prices, which it seemed they had to do to get the majors; they might get me back by lowering prices. It's not a matter of what the music is worth as much as what emusic is worth.
At least for annual subscribers (like me), the vast majority of emusic prices are significantly lower than competitors'. Assuming the catalog offerings satisfy, it's a no-brainer option for the merely cost-conscious. (eMusic certainly leaves much to desire as an experience, but so many low-cost offerings do.)
Can't summon much patience for the "emusic should drop its prices" comments at the other place, somehow. Most of the stuff that is not leaving is already very cheap. If folk complain that it is indie music at mainstream prices (whcih it isn't) is that not implying mainstream music is actually better and should cost more? (A proposition that I find hard to digest).
i have no "dog in the fight" anymore, so to speak, since i haven't been an emusic member for years now, but this is so otm. reading the boards there this weekend, for the first time in a long time, made me wonder if this is what places like reddit or 4chan are like.
Well, that sure wouldn't come from my end, but not so sure that won't be the end of me for emusic.
It's not a matter of what the music is worth as much as what emusic is worth.
Emusic has saved my a ton of money over the years so for me they're worth it. In Canada we never had access to the majors or ECM, so there's nothing to miss there. I hope to still enjoy the fact that we have a cap of $.49 (Can) on tracks regardless of length of tracks. Being a thrifty kind of person I'd like to pay as little as possible for something and being someone who loves listening to music I devote a healthy portion of my available income and time to find it.
What is emusic worth.
Well, it certainly introduced me to a great bunch of folks and if I wasn't on hold with emusic until Xmas I'd access my account that I added my musical fiends to and copy them here. I still see some old names show up there (and here) and i'm always happy to see they're still around (car 68 Where are You?) I believe Katrina/Xatrina and CaptWhiffle were my first lastfm friends and although i don't do much interneting, I'm very happy that some other folks have let me peek in to see what they've been listening to also.
When I first started internetting in 2001 the only thing that interested me was finding music. I knew there was way more to it than that but the music always drew me in. The first computer we had was the classic iMac G3(coloured blue with 6 Gb of memory, i think) and once I conquered Bugdom I was ready to take over the internet. I flirted with Limewire and then got seduced by cheap/illegal? sites coming out of Russia and used up a lot of that space. Finding emusic in 2003 was such a relief.
The all you could eat days and I got in just near the end. As germanprof mentioned, what i loved the most were the lists it used to show. There were so many great lists of music that you could tell people had really taken some time to do and had a passion for putting in that time. It was a lot of fun just to see where one list would lead you to. Those were the days that reinforced my quest to explore. Threads about music and lots of mocking those that didn't get it. It was all a lot of fun til emu lost track of who they were. I believe that as a business, Emusic(US) really thought they could take over the market, but Emusic (Canada, Europe and zones unknown) didn't mean too much in their big picture and I'm still not sure where we fit in, nor am i sure whose apology they're addressing.
At any rate, the only thing that could spice up their boards and get folks interested in exploring is to have a link to these boards, and thank those folks that continue to contribute expose us to emusic's vast library. Maybe then we could take advantage of their preview option and afford us each a bonus.
-always
ps Friend / Fiend - they're one in the same.
PPS This has all got me thinking about those great guitar threads.....Thanks amclark2
An Industry Insider's View Of eMusic, from back in 2008. Came across this in responding to a thread over at the messboard; I'll refrain from throwing these numbers into the shark tank over there. Short version is, they paid lousy, and presumably were offering better terms to the majors than the indies could get. So perhaps a glimmer of hope that they might now be in position to offer terms more favorable to lure the indies back.
@Doofy, Daniel, the message board over there feels to me this time around like tired invective. In some of the past blow-ups there was a lot of detailed discussion of things that needed discussing amid the moaning. What I have seen so far this time around, a lot of it just feels like formulaic griping, and some of it is painfully transparent "you made a change, you should give me free music". And yes, a few people have taken it as their life's mission to post a snarky comment every single time the moderator says anything, however informative it might be.
Emusic might have got further with its message board if it had identified some ringleaders and created some incentive for them to work on some constructive threads. For a long time it has been almost entirely a place to complain.
@Doofy2 - thanks for that link, it is interesting. I was interested to read the first two comments underneath, especially the second one about pool-and-percentage-based royalty payments; should we deduce from the 2009 change in how albums are priced that that model no longer operates? There would be no point to labels being able to choose a price point, with one album at $2.94 and another at $8.99 if the payout model were still based on overall percentage of downloads/revenue (in fact it would disadvantage the higher priced albums, which would contribute more money but may get fewer downloads). So I find it hard to imagine that the model discussed in that article is still the way it works. The move from credits to money and from money to variable album pricing seem like loves away from the pool model.
Prof, good point, that must have been back in per-track days. I guess at that time, the advantage would be to albums with many tracks - Which were often "too expensive" because they ate too many DLs!
In any case, in trying to get a sense of 'why the indies left,' low pay rates seem a likely answer. The issue of not paying out on free promo tracks is also something that comes up in those old articles. Not really my scene, but I am hoping for the sake of eMu and its subscriber base that they can really go back and mend fences with the popular alt-indie labels.
You may well be right. Another possibility is that the indies left over differential pay rates, which might be another way of saying low pay rates but is not exactly the same thing. The labels that left had stuck with emusic for quite a while during the time that we know it had very low pay rates, then they left - was it because under the newer model the majors got a sweeter deal, I wonder?
In effect they are colluding with the record companies, large and small to not tell the customer what is actually going on. Of course it's only a matter of time before we will be reading on some website what actually went down.
emusic "false-flag" theories are my favorite nu-thread topic over there.
Hey all, truth is if eMu hadn't done this without warning and left me sitting on some Booster cash I did have some plans for, I don't know that I would even care anymore. I have so much music at this point I can't get too upset. It's just one more step in eMu's journey to make itself less and less relevant to my life. Still be filling in holes in the moldy oldie collection, and we'll have to see what shows up. Meantime, Marty Stuart may not be showing up in search over there but Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives still are, and they have the brand new album priced at single disc - it's not - so take some comfort perhaps - Saturday Night/Sunday Morning.
Does anybody seriously think that emusic could at this point have gone back to the indie labels and said "you know what, we are ditching the majors now, and the reason we introduced variable album pricing, enabling those of you that chose to to raise the prices of your albums, was to accommodate the majors, so now we are going to withdraw the privilege and unilaterally reduce all of your album prices again and give you less money, but you should stay anyway because we are indie and charging even less for all of our music is so going to help us survive"?
Also, I still don't get why not having the majors should mean things should be cheaper. A chunk of the music I buy is MORE expensive because it is rare/small market (little bespoke labels). That's how a lot of economics works. I pay more for a good microbrew than a can of cat's pee, more for a cup of loose leaf darjeeling than a lipton's teabag, more for a goat's cheese, walnut and avocado pizza than a Pizza hut combo deal. And I just cheerfully paid $20 for Porya Hatami's new CD while none of Amazon's $5 releases look interesting. It's the major label stuff that should be a couple of dollars an album, because of economies of scale, not the indie music.
If they did go back to the old price structure, there would likely be some significant inflation. Five years have passed since Sony joined, bring per track prices to 49 cents. Moreover, many non-majors were using higher per-track prices. If there are savings to be had, I would hope that they are in more flexible plans and sales.
Found it though. Will give it a slower read later. Am with you though re ECM almost requiring CD purchase. Many times already I have made ECM super-expensive for myself by buying the MP3 at emusic and then deciding I had to get them on CD. The problem is that ECM don't seem to do streaming services, so buying at emusic often seems like an admittedly expensive way of doing a trial run on something I might like.
The new Marcin Wasilewski, however, is pre-ordered on CD.
It is kind of interesting that the threads debating the changes at emusic are already off the front page of the board. It has been a storm in a teacup on their board compared to past upheavals. (Maybe it's that the angry folk already left. Maybe there are too few who use the board any more to generate a good rebellion. Maybe it's the absence of Ann from San Francisco.)
I agree with you there BT, but I have been paying the same per track ever since I joined emusic, which signifies that music is getting cheaper pro rata to everything else, or market forces/competition are keeping prices down. Or maybe, emusic have a such a small market outside the US that it is barely worth their while putting up prices (first part likely, second part unlikely!) Probably none of those!
Comments
I sincerely hope to get back to that soon. I've had too much going on over the past year but I might find more time for it now. If the next part doesn't appear by the end of October you'll need to talk severely to me.
My S4L relatively unscathed - Only regrets (so far) are a few MIAs from Atlantic jazz
It has been available since 2008 and now includes 532 albums:
http://www.emusic.com/browse/album/all/label:206159/page/3/
- with the latest addition sept.11.2014
- and The New Series, also since 2008 with now 207 albums:
http://www.emusic.com/browse/album/all/label:206928/?sort=newest
- Also with the latest addition sept.11.2014
- So I guess that it most likely will stay.
i have no "dog in the fight" anymore, so to speak, since i haven't been an emusic member for years now, but this is so otm. reading the boards there this weekend, for the first time in a long time, made me wonder if this is what places like reddit or 4chan are like.
i think the top five members of the angry-mob are the same ones storming the bastille during the last big change.
Well, that sure wouldn't come from my end, but not so sure that won't be the end of me for emusic.
It's not a matter of what the music is worth as much as what emusic is worth.
Emusic has saved my a ton of money over the years so for me they're worth it. In Canada we never had access to the majors or ECM, so there's nothing to miss there. I hope to still enjoy the fact that we have a cap of $.49 (Can) on tracks regardless of length of tracks. Being a thrifty kind of person I'd like to pay as little as possible for something and being someone who loves listening to music I devote a healthy portion of my available income and time to find it.
What is emusic worth.
Well, it certainly introduced me to a great bunch of folks and if I wasn't on hold with emusic until Xmas I'd access my account that I added my musical fiends to and copy them here. I still see some old names show up there (and here) and i'm always happy to see they're still around (car 68 Where are You?) I believe Katrina/Xatrina and CaptWhiffle were my first lastfm friends and although i don't do much interneting, I'm very happy that some other folks have let me peek in to see what they've been listening to also.
When I first started internetting in 2001 the only thing that interested me was finding music. I knew there was way more to it than that but the music always drew me in. The first computer we had was the classic iMac G3(coloured blue with 6 Gb of memory, i think) and once I conquered Bugdom I was ready to take over the internet. I flirted with Limewire and then got seduced by cheap/illegal? sites coming out of Russia and used up a lot of that space. Finding emusic in 2003 was such a relief.
The all you could eat days and I got in just near the end. As germanprof mentioned, what i loved the most were the lists it used to show. There were so many great lists of music that you could tell people had really taken some time to do and had a passion for putting in that time. It was a lot of fun just to see where one list would lead you to. Those were the days that reinforced my quest to explore. Threads about music and lots of mocking those that didn't get it. It was all a lot of fun til emu lost track of who they were. I believe that as a business, Emusic(US) really thought they could take over the market, but Emusic (Canada, Europe and zones unknown) didn't mean too much in their big picture and I'm still not sure where we fit in, nor am i sure whose apology they're addressing.
At any rate, the only thing that could spice up their boards and get folks interested in exploring is to have a link to these boards, and thank those folks that continue to contribute expose us to emusic's vast library. Maybe then we could take advantage of their preview option and afford us each a bonus.
-always
ps Friend / Fiend - they're one in the same.
PPS This has all got me thinking about those great guitar threads.....Thanks amclark2
Emusic might have got further with its message board if it had identified some ringleaders and created some incentive for them to work on some constructive threads. For a long time it has been almost entirely a place to complain.
In any case, in trying to get a sense of 'why the indies left,' low pay rates seem a likely answer. The issue of not paying out on free promo tracks is also something that comes up in those old articles. Not really my scene, but I am hoping for the sake of eMu and its subscriber base that they can really go back and mend fences with the popular alt-indie labels.
emusic "false-flag" theories are my favorite nu-thread topic over there.
Something is happening.
Oh, eMu is going back to no majors, but keeping the price increases.
Huh.
Craig
Also, I still don't get why not having the majors should mean things should be cheaper. A chunk of the music I buy is MORE expensive because it is rare/small market (little bespoke labels). That's how a lot of economics works. I pay more for a good microbrew than a can of cat's pee, more for a cup of loose leaf darjeeling than a lipton's teabag, more for a goat's cheese, walnut and avocado pizza than a Pizza hut combo deal. And I just cheerfully paid $20 for Porya Hatami's new CD while none of Amazon's $5 releases look interesting. It's the major label stuff that should be a couple of dollars an album, because of economies of scale, not the indie music.
www.birdistheworm.com/the-recent-catalog-changes-at-emusic/
It's a very long column and it includes embedded music. It would've looked very messy had I just copied & pasted it here on this thread.
Cheers.
EDIT:
I don't understand why I can't get my link to work. It's strange. I've done this a million times before. Brighternow posted a good link below.
Found it though. Will give it a slower read later. Am with you though re ECM almost requiring CD purchase. Many times already I have made ECM super-expensive for myself by buying the MP3 at emusic and then deciding I had to get them on CD. The problem is that ECM don't seem to do streaming services, so buying at emusic often seems like an admittedly expensive way of doing a trial run on something I might like.
The new Marcin Wasilewski, however, is pre-ordered on CD.