The end of eMusic and me
Why I ended my 10+ year affair with the digital music service eMusic.
Why I ended my 10+ year affair with the digital music service eMusic.
In reading the recent New York Post article EMusic mulls sale as digital market shifts (pointed to by eMusic subscriber okierambler in a recent message board...
A while back my copy of iTunes saw fit to present me (for the first time?) with a party playlist. I honestly can’t imagine any party that would have this as ...
In two previous posts about my current use of eMusic I discussed my musical jobs to be done and how I might now supplement eMusic with other services in orde...
Swindleeeee!!!!! is dead, long live my old Swindleeeee!!!! posts.
As all long-time eMusic watchers are aware, eMusic’s business model has always been based on the health club model, i.e., the assumption that a certain perce...
Given the extent to which Michael Jackson the person was crushed beneath the weight of Michael Jackson the commercial phenomenon, it’s sadly appropriate that...
In my previous post I lamented the demise of eMusic as I’ve known it, and in preparation for the future discussed my jobs to be done related to discovering a...
In less than a month my grandfathered eMusic Basic 2-year plan (40 tracks per month at a cost of $7.49 per month or $0.19 per track) will end, and I’ll face ...
Most of the press coverage of the eMusic/Sony agreement has been either regurgitated press releases and echoes of the original New York Times story, or stori...
As is amply clear from recent postings on the eMusic message boards and comments on 17 Dots, eMusic pretty much made a hash of its announcement of the Sony a...
Well, I significantly underestimated how far eMusic was willing to go in terms of changing its pricing to attract major label content. My personal guess was ...
Danny Stein, eMusic’s new CEO, dropped some major news just now on eMusic’s semi-official 17 Dots blog. As reported in more detail in the New York Times, Son...
Bob Lefsetz recently published another broadside in his continuing crusade to drag the music industry into the 21st century. In this one he asked the followi...
Continuing a tradition from last year, here’s what you can find on eMusic from the list of recommended 2008 recordings published by Alex Ross. (Note that Cap...
On the eMusic message boards I just saw a post from rednano74 about Amazon offering 50 albums for $5. Silly me, I thought this meant for $5 I could buy 50 al...
(In the spirit of Twitter, I’ll keep this post brief.)
I happened to get an eMusic email a few days ago (announcing new releases in the alternative/punk category) and noticed a link to a special offer for AT&...
Today I got interrupted from my Swindleeeee!!!!! blogging slumber by the news that David Pakman is leaving eMusic. I have been critical of Pakman one or two ...
I happened to be reading Bob Lefsetz recently on the Rolling Stones moving to Universal from EMI; after a few minutes I thought to myself, Hey, I think I kno...
Back in February I discussed eMusic’s failure to provide more information about the artists whose music it sells, and suggested some ways it could do better....
Sometimes I can’t help but agree with Bob Lefsetz’s thesis that the music industry is well and truly f*cked, and this is one of those times.
I don’t have time to follow every little bit of eMusic news, but I do find it interesting to look at eMusic’s press releases from time to time. One that rece...
Now that I’ve gone and hyped eMusic Selects, I feel I’ve earned the right to make a suggestion, for any eMusic poobahs who may be reading this: As I understa...
I thought I should say a little bit about the new eMusic Selects program. eMusic really wants people to know about this; in addition to a link on the eMusic ...
In the past I’ve discussed several ways in which I think eMusic could improve itself for the benefit of both its customers and its suppliers (i.e., the music...
The migration of Swindleeeee!!!!! to wordpress.com is now complete. The domain swindleeeee.com now redirects to the new blog, as do variant spellings such as...
Currently Swindleeeee!!!!! is hosted on a server I administer, and uses the WordPress blogging software. Over the years I’ve grown tired of maintaining my ow...
For the most part I resist writing about the actual music on eMusic, because I’m really not a very good musical critic. However from time to time I do feel t...
No, Alex Ross (of The Rest is Noise fame, both blog and book) isn’t being mean to eMusic; in fact to my knowledge he’s never mentioned it, at least on his bl...
Now that Amazon has opened a beta version of its MP3 store and everybody else has commented on it (see for example Hypebot’s roundup, as well as good takes f...
Last Sunday night I happened to be reading the eMusic message boards when I saw a new post announcing the availability on eMusic of the new album Kala from M...
Reading one of Bob Lefsetz’s latest letters recently I found out about Universal’s plan to offer digital music in a DRM-free format (although not through iTu...
If anyone is still reading this blog, my apologies: I’ve been preoccupied with work and family matters and haven’t posted anything since May. In fact, things...
From time to time I like to highlight eMusic-related business deals. Here’s a new one (not mentioned on the eMusic press release page): eMusic will be the fe...
In part 2 of my series “Sympathy for the labels” (see also part 1) I discussed the concern of labels that selling through eMusic lowers overall profitability...
In my previous post I discussed the difficulties that independent labels were having in adapting to the new landscape of the music business, and whether eMus...
I previously commented on the Billboard article about labels’ unhappiness with eMusic, although I got some of the facts of the article wrong—an obvious remin...
David Pakman (CEO of eMusic—but you already knew that, right?) has traditionally confined his public comments to press interviews. However in the wake of rep...
I don’t normally do breaking news, because frankly I’m just too busy to keep track of what’s happening every day in the music business. However I’ll make an ...
Now that I’ve done a lengthy eMusic-related post I feel less guilty about doing yet another post on Amazon and its rumored plans to enter the digital music m...
Reading a post by Clay Shirkey concerning Scott McCloud’s abandoning the use of micropayments, I (re)discovered a 10-year-old article by Nick Szabo on mental...
It’s unseemly to gloat that I told you so, but I’m not being paid for this gig so I’ll take my satisfaction where I can find it: According to a Digital Music...
In a previous post I offered some pretty snarky advice for indie labels complaining about eMusic per-track payouts. For this post I ‘ll try to look at things...
I love that people at eMusic are posting at 17 dots; as I mentioned previously, it’s integrating eMusic itself into the eMusic user community. But… I do almo...
Hypebot seems to engaging in a mild form of eMusic deathwatch lately, this time questioning eMusic’s apparent success in adding new subscribers and labels. A...
Courtesy of Hypebot’s New Music Business Briefing this week: The mainstream music industry press (in the form of Billboard) talks about the possibility of Am...
Today Hypebot posted the promised article discussing how Amazon can succeed in the digital music business. Also as promised, I will now comment on Hypebot’s ...
After exhausting myself making predictions about Amazon and its possible entry into the digital music market, I’m now prompted to return to the topic, prompt...
This is the fourth and final in a series of posts (following parts 1, 2, and 3) speculating on Amazon’s rumored entry into the digital music market. In this ...
This is the third in a series of posts (following parts 1 and 2) speculating on Amazon’s rumored entry into the digital music market. In this post I discuss ...
In my previous post I speculated how Amazon’s rumored entry into the digital music market (e.g., through a possible acquisition of eMusic) might initiate som...
When considering the possibility of Amazon buying eMusic, one of the things I think is most interesting is the potential impact of having a single major onli...
Well, I leave off blogging about eMusic for a month and look what happens: I happen to check Hypebot this evening and find that Amazon is rumored to be buyin...
I recently read Seth Godin’s book Small is the New Big–basically a collection of his blog posts published on dead trees. (I checked it out from the library, ...
As chance would have it, I was inspired recently to try to start blogging again about eMusic, after a few months during which I was busy with other things an...
When I last commented on the subject of Amazon.com and digital music I had some rather scathing things to say. Now, according to a Hypebot article Amazon is ...
How come I didn’t know about this before? Jon Strunk, a product manager at eMusic, not only has a blog (is he the only person at eMusic with one?), he’s also...
Here’s a weird one, perhaps even weirder than the eMusic deal with Westin Hotels: Johnny Rockets Expands Music Initiative with Local Market Campaign. For tho...
My apologies for not posting in recent days; work has taken precedence. Here are two quick items to help fill the void for now: First, Pioneers of the Inevit...
Harald Walker wrote me to note that eMusic seems to have changed its past policies regarding how it treats departing subscribers:
Yesterday I happened to read a blog post from Paul Kedrovsky containing some sage advice for companies competing in new markets: declare victory early and of...
In a comment to his blog post The strange world of digital music, Nicholas Carr acknowledges the role that Apple’s proprietary DRM scheme has played in fendi...
In the flood of press articles on Microsoft’s recent Zune announcement, I happened to take special note of one that appeared in The Register, titled The iPod...
I’ve been meaning for a while to comment on the Guardian article A musical tail of hits and misses, which attempts to address the question of whether the muc...
Well, it’s old news to us, but according to Reuters eMusic is officially launching its Europe service; it appears that eMusic is trying to take advantage of ...
Stereophile just published an online article Naxos: Classical in the Key of MP3 with more information on the MPkey collections from Naxos and eMusic. Along w...
I’ve added a new page to the Swindleeeee!!!!! site, “Pakman speaks”, with links to published interviews and other comments by David Pakman, President and CEO...
This is Money, a UK web site by the publisher of the Daily Mail newspaper, recently published an article The Best Music Download Sites, in which they rated t...
Courtesy of Google News I found an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal apparently about a new Naxos initiative in partnership with eMusic. It’s behi...
In a prior post a while back I talked about how job postings were useful clues to what a company’s up to. Well, I found some more eMusic job postings, courte...
Really, everyone getting excited about SpiralFrog’s announcement should just stop reading fevered pronouncements like a huge blow to established music stores...
This is the second in a series of posts about eMusic’s pricing strategy. (See also part 1.) In this post I discuss the possible motivations behind eMusic’s p...
I happened to read a blog post by a John Zorn fan ruminating about whether to buy albums from Zorn’s Tzadik label from eMusic or elsewhere. So he asked Tzadi...
Im my original post on eMusic Europe I noted that the prices for the Basic plan in Europe increased significantly more versus the US price than the correspon...
Thanks to the persistence of dhaith we now have more definitive information on how eMusic will be handling existing UK and Europe subscribers on the annual a...
Press articles on the launch of eMusic UK are starting to appear; representative articles can be found in The Register and MacWorld UK, with other outlets li...
This is a followup to my previous post on eMusic’s new prices. In this post I provide the equivalent per-track prices for all products offered in the US, the...
Thanks to poppi and xtrev I now have a complete set of eMusic prices for the UK and the rest of Europe as they would apply to new subscribers. (Recall that c...
The big news on the eMusic message boards the past day or so is that eMusic is introducing a European version of its service (currently in “beta”). There’s n...
The mainstream media is beginning to take note of eMusic. The latest sign: a favorable article in USA Today, “EMusic’s pitch: Download song-and own it”. I fo...
My last post illustrated one way to figure out where a company like eMusic is going: look at its job listings. This post shows another way: look at press rel...
As part of my day job I try to keep track of what’s happening in the various Mozilla discussion forums. Today I happened an interesting post in the mozilla.j...
For quite some time now I’ve been a subscriber to eMusic, a digital music site that offers DRM-free MP3 tracks by artists on independent (non-major) labels. ...