eMusic

[The Tatman]

Is anyone besides me on eMusic? I'm pretty sure it's a legal service, as it goes by subscriptions, & I always see it advertised next to Rhapsody, Napster & iTunes. Anyway, nearly everything on iTunes is on eMusic, which means a lot of old school ska tunes. What I just found today (& I'm not sure these are on other places) is Dub Store's releases!

Dub Store is the Japanese store that has been making a bunch of reissues of Jamaican stuff. I found (& previously didn't know it existed) Tomorrow's Children's "Bang Bang Rocksteady/Rain". Rain is my favorite Beatles song, & I was absolutely floored to hear it in a rocksteady style.

Anyway, the records are anywhere from $10-20, plus the shipping from Japan. I just bought this single on eMusic for $.99

Does anyone know more about the legitimacy/ethics of eMusic? My understanding is that music is placed in their service directly by the record labels. I'm not 100% convinced that is true. I remember a long time ago, that Bucket commented that Moon Ska recieved very little money from the releases sold on eMusic.

Also, I'm not saying that this is better than the vinyl, but I'd rather have a couple of songs for 99 cents than not have a 7", because it cost $25 or more.

[ReggaeFire]

eMusic is a fully legit service. They used to have this crazy deal where you'd pay like $15 a month and get unlimited downloads, it was all indy labels, and it was insane. The labels saw almost no money from it, because well, it was a terrible business model. I must have gotten around 500 hundred albums from them over the years. The company got purchased around 2003 and started adding major labels which led to the current incarnation of the service.

Typically the way labels end up there is that they sign up with a digital distributor who handles the licensing to all the online services. I think the labels can opt out of certain stores if they want to, but most don't bother, so they end up on a lot of stores launched by start ups with wacky business models.

A few years ago there was a start up called AmieStreet where the concept was that the first X number of downloads started at 25¢ and increased in price with each download until it hit 99¢. It made sense for bigger artists, it got people to try to buy things as soon as they came out and increased engagement with the site, but for more obscure music it just meant that things were just being sold really cheap, around $3 per album. Add onto that they gave away huge bonus' for pre-paying (up to 50% more, so I'd give them $100 and get $150 worth of credit). Man that was a bad thing for a compulsive music purchaser like me. Amazon ended up buying them and shutting them down right around the time they were trying to launch their own mp3 store.

There was another one, Guevera, which gave you music for watching ads. You just clicked on an ad, switched to another tab and read the newspaper for 30 seconds, came back when the ad done and had a download credit. That one burned through their VC money in like 3 months. Got some mainstream pop stuff I wouldn't normally buy from it.

[TheACBubbaMaster]

I use it.