It continues. Brownswood, a leading UK jazz/hip-hop label, has gone. Also I noticed Doxy releases, mainly, it appears to me, bootleg albums, have gone. You notice that as soon as you go to Popular in last Month in Jazz section. They had been amongst the top sellers recently. I've got enough credit for two tracks. Once that has gone, I'll pull the plug again.
Update - just noticed Marsalis Music, and some Nagel Heyer also missing - those appear to be the more recent recordings. The reissues are still available....
I resisted streaming for a long time but recently started a Spotify family plan when my eMu subscription ran out in December. Basically spending the same money each month, but listening to all sorts of new releases on my commute to/from work. My daughter is thrilled (she had been begging for Spotify for months) and I'm digging it as well. Still buying the occasional download, mostly on Bandcamp. And trying to support artists by going to shows, since touring seems to be the only way they're making real money these days.
@Brighternow, I notice that Sub Rosa and Bedroom Community are gone too. These were the last remaining canaries in the coal mine for me--I put my account on hold immediately, with a note in my calendar to cancel in 90 days unless something miraculous happens. Because I'm optimistic. No, because I hate change.
Yeah, this is awful . . . on the brighter side, Intakt and Winter & Winter is still there, at least for now
Yeah, dozens more labels gone as of yesterday - looks perhaps like the remainder of the Believe distribution catalogue (based on anecdotal evidence that RareNoise is among those gone and just posted in the reddit forum a couple weeks ago mentioning they used Believe as their distributor).
Yet, through it all, eMusic still finds time to actually post these tweets in the past two days (the second one below actually, and quite ironically, coming the day before this latest purge of labels due to non-payment). Is there such a thing as "corporate dementia"? These tweets seem so unbelievably random and tone deaf that it's just hard to even imagine anyone captaining the ship there anymore...
First up, this wildly irrelevant tweet, posted just two hours ago, the day after their catalogue was further decimated:
"New member of our advisory team Sean Koh has produced work for artists
such as k-pop star Jessica Jung, and he’s given a speech before the
United Nations to introduce Secretary General Ban Ki-moon."
And then we have the very poster child of irony itself, a tweet posted by eMusic the day before the purge:
"70% of eMusic users think artists should be paid more fairly. Join the movement."
Words cannot possibly describe how bizarre this company has become...
So this just happened...I was cleaning out the last of my eMu dollars by downloading For Tune jazz albums. I purchase and download three of them, when I go back to the label page for one more, the label was empty. While I was buying the music the label disappeared.
Yep, that was one of them. eMusic can't deliver any music of interest anymore, and they are stealing from the very artists they proclaim to be championing, but HEY, they can sign up advisors who have spoken at the United Nations! Woohoo!
"Sorry artists whose music we keep giving away without paying you, but we needed your money to acquire an advisor for our blockchain project who has UN speaking experience! Thanks for understanding! - Love, eMu"
Well, I've cleaned out the SFLs mostly and I'm down to 26 cents. I have two weeks to review whether I've downloaded everything successfully that I've purchased and then I think I'm done. 14 years and a lot of GBs later it doesn't seem they are going to stay afloat like this - the prices on what little new material they get keep creeping up and most of what they're selling that I don't already have, which ain't much, isn't even worth half-price. Very sad but I've got my hard drive to keep me warm.
Going to eMusic now is like searching through sale albums in the old days weeks after everyone else has been through them. You have to look long and hard to find anything you really want. Ditto BDB - I've got plenty that I have not really played that much on my hard drive. If I play everything that I have only ever played a maximum of twice it would take me at least two or three months of playing nothing else to get through them.
Hell's bells, half the albums in my measly remaining SFL, some of which were available YESTERDAY, are gone. All 4 albums I added last week are gone. Before my refresh I plan to be gone too.
More irony, from emusic twitter a week ago: "“YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music — they need to resolve the problem that
artists want to make a living by making music."
Emusic need to solve that problem, and also the problem that customers want to be able to buy music.
y'all made me want to check out my saved-for-later list. It shows two albums (I feel like there was maybe 10-12 when I quit), but for both of the remaining, when I click on them it tell me that they're unavailable. Glad I deserted the sinking shop when I did.
Hi
Peter, thanks for reaching out for an update. Sorry for the delay! As
others have mentioned our token sale continues, and we continue to
pursue the right mechanisms that will allow us to restore our catalog
and our partnerships, old and new. Our head of content continues to
update the recommended portion of the app/site within the catalog that
remains - we hope you've been able to see some content there of interest
to you. On the artist side, we've been working with a number of artists
who are interested in being a part of the early stages of the
blockchain platform with enabled features such as tipping, album
exclusives and digital collectibles. We were proud to be part of a
panel related to blockchain initiatives along with Ujo, Choon and others
at SXSW discussing how this new technology can affect meaningful change
- we'll post a synopsis of our experience soon on our Medium blog.
Lara's response is a slightly more eloquent version of what Sam used to regularly post - e.g. "we're working on it", "it's a priority", "distributor *** will be back next month", etc.
Until you see a tweet (and eMusic is nothing if not a prolific Twitter user) announcing they have hit their $20M soft cap (which is the threshold of money they have to raise in order to get access to any of the money), it's highly unlikely that we'll see anything more than periodic, and always polite, posts from the likes of Lara and whomever is now monitoring the Reddit forum.
Fool's gold if you are hanging on those words as justification to keep a subscription...
Hi everybody, following please find latest update (May 14) from @Laraloo11 of eMusic.
Hi @peterfrederics thanks for reaching out! In terms of an update, we haven't seen any new content removal since the last round, but we haven't been able to add any back in yet. Some of what we mentioned in the whitepaper we wrote for the new blockchain distribution platform is moving forward in big strides this month, but that doesn't seem to interest most of the group on Reddit so we stopped posting about it, and I can't publicly talk about it yet, so that is still TBD anyway. Several emerging artists are creating blockchain pages in support of the effort, I'll be promoting those across other social properties. We should be refreshing the web/app headers this week to call out some of the new releases on Polyvinyl and Merge.
We are doing some of the things we mentioned somewhere and other stuff did not get worse and some folk with little to lose are giving the new thing a fling. Still not missing what’s there at the moment at all.
Are these "emerging artists creating blockchain pages" the same ones making the "This is My Cousin's Music Video" posts over on the eMusic reddit forum? That's about what I imagine will be the typical "artist" signing up for the blockchain... ;-)
It's good that @laraloo11 is still fighting the good fight - I wish her well. But until money shows up and content gets restored, it's going to continue to be a very lean period at eZombie.
Comments
Update - just noticed Marsalis Music, and some Nagel Heyer also missing - those appear to be the more recent recordings. The reissues are still available....
"70% of eMusic users think artists should be paid more fairly. Join the movement."
If what we hear is true, and I believe it is, any payment would be better!! And where is the trust if distributors and labels remain unpaid?
[–]Laraloo11 10 hours ago
Hi Peter, thanks for reaching out for an update. Sorry for the delay! As others have mentioned our token sale continues, and we continue to pursue the right mechanisms that will allow us to restore our catalog and our partnerships, old and new. Our head of content continues to update the recommended portion of the app/site within the catalog that remains - we hope you've been able to see some content there of interest to you. On the artist side, we've been working with a number of artists who are interested in being a part of the early stages of the blockchain platform with enabled features such as tipping, album exclusives and digital collectibles. We were proud to be part of a panel related to blockchain initiatives along with Ujo, Choon and others at SXSW discussing how this new technology can affect meaningful change - we'll post a synopsis of our experience soon on our Medium blog.
Until you see a tweet (and eMusic is nothing if not a prolific Twitter user) announcing they have hit their $20M soft cap (which is the threshold of money they have to raise in order to get access to any of the money), it's highly unlikely that we'll see anything more than periodic, and always polite, posts from the likes of Lara and whomever is now monitoring the Reddit forum.
Hi @peterfrederics thanks for reaching out! In terms of an update, we haven't seen any new content removal since the last round, but we haven't been able to add any back in yet. Some of what we mentioned in the whitepaper we wrote for the new blockchain distribution platform is moving forward in big strides this month, but that doesn't seem to interest most of the group on Reddit
That's supposed to be good news then! Can't be that much most people would actually miss anyway!
Yes we have no bananas, we have no bananas today
It's good that @laraloo11 is still fighting the good fight - I wish her well. But until money shows up and content gets restored, it's going to continue to be a very lean period at eZombie.