So if you’ve seen my last music haul video you may have noticed that I spoke praises of a certain music downloading service. So maybe the title here will seem a bit out of the blue. But a few days ago I did in fact cancel my eMusic account after using their service for nearly four years.
The Situation
Recently I went on to my eMusic account to download my monthly dose of music. I started using the service because they had a great selection of both mainstream and independent artists, with a emphasis on the independent artists. I liked being able to download music from a band I was just starting to get into without feeling too much financial guilt about it, but I also liked being able to download the occasional guilty pleasure, again, without the financial guilt.
When I went to my account a few days ago I went to go re-download This Wild Life’s recent album Clouded since somehow the files got screwed up the first time I downloaded it. When I got to their artist page only one song was on it. The album I had only downloaded a couple of months ago was gone. I then noticed that I had a new message. The message was essentially to tell me that eMusic decided to go back to their strictly independent roots and was removing all of the major label music from their site. This left me feeling a bit confused, as far as I knew This Wild Life wasn’t exactly “mainstream” and they weren’t on a major label. So why couldn’t I find their music?
While I contemplated leaving the service I did some research hoping to answer such a question. It turns out that they not only removed artists that were signed to major labels but also artists who used major labels to distribute their music. This pretty much eliminates just about every band I listen to. So I quickly canceled my account. I didn’t see the point in spending $12 every month to not use it.
Why I have a problem with this
I loved eMusic’s selection and loved that they were probably the cheapest, legal downloading service (as far as I know). I loved that I could download the new Rihanna song while finding the opening act I just saw at a concert as well. Now that’s gone and I’m pretty sad about it.
To me this has got to be a money issue more than a dignity issue, but if that’s the case disguising this as a dignity issue bothers me. It wasn’t like they suddenly stopped supporting independent artists, all the indie bands were still on their site, they just opened their services to a few more popular artists as well and offered a greater variety.
I wouldn’t even have as much of an issue with it if they had at least kept the artists that are on labels like Epitaph, Rise Records, Fueled By Ramen and so on. I know that some of the bands on these labels are by no means unheard of, but they’re not the kind of bands you hear on the radio or that you can find in the stores easily (especially now that Hot Topic has almost stopped carrying music altogether). It was nice to have a place to go when going to the record store failed me.
This switch kind of leaves those middle level bands hanging, and this whole situation smells of music snobbery, so I’m just done.
If anyone reading this knows a good alternative downloading service that I can look into, that would be wonderful! Please let me know in the comments! Are you an eMusic subscriber? Do you like the switch or not? In the comments please!
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The Tracks At Christie Road 