Emusic vs Rhapsody
Emusic, which I've happily been a subscriber to since its inception, just announced its purchase by Dimensional Associates LLC. The public relations speak of the merger: "First, we are pleased to inform you that EMusic.com Inc. is being acquired by Dimensional Associates LLC ("Dimensional"), a private equity group focused on providing innovative online music distribution services. Dimensional shares EMusic's consumer focused philosophy of providing low cost, convenient access to great music. Dimensional plans to continue enhancing the EMusic service with new features and content and you can look forward to hearing more once the acquisition has been completed."
What having a "focused philosophy of providing low cost, convenient access to great music" means: "As of November 8, EMusic will be discontinuing the unlimited service offering and replacing it with a new service offering that places a reasonable limit on the number of downloads available to each subscriber in a billing month. At that time, EMusic will offer two service plans: EMusic Basic: $9.99 per month/maximum 40 downloads or EMusic Plus: $14.99 per month/maximum 65 downloads."
Now, I've been paying $9.99 a month for "unlimited" downloads and yes, I understand that there is a limit to "un"-limited, but I'm not sure how going from being able to sample FULL songs off any record in their database to being able to barely download THREE albums a month qualifies as being "low cost" or "convenient" or the result of a "focused philosophy."
Goodbye Emusic. It was fun. I'll be in the first lifeboat with all the FAX records that I could find. Thanks.
I signed up for a free trial over at Rhapsody this evening. I'm listening to Enigma's new record, Voyageur, right now. I can listen to it as often as I like over the next week, as well as anything else Rhapsody has in their system, before my free trial turns into something that'll cost me. I have six days to decide how I feel about paying for streaming on-demand access to music versus actually having a CD copy of it. Part of me says that I already too many CDs and not enough storage space and whether I'm streaming it or playing it in the CD player in my computer, it's coming out the same speakers.
Part of me is sad about the lack of ownership. But that part has been losing the bigger battle of "so much shit, so little time" for awhile now. Eh, we'll see. I have six days.
Listening to dZihan & Kamien's Gran Riserva right now. Got some catching up to do. Sure wish Rhapsody had a search by label function. And a less cluttered interface.