eMusic has finally exploded.
eMusic, one of the pioneers of the musical download business, seems to have finally gone kaput, at least insofar as their selection of classical music is concerned.
A quick recap of their history to this point. In the early years, they had a broad selection, but tracks were fairly low quality (ie less than 256 kbps). A couple of years ago, they switched over to 320 kbps, which is good enough in my book, especially at the prices offered. Typically albums were priced around $5 to $8 – ie competitive – but it was also possible to prepay for "booster packs" and thus get albums for roughly 50% off.
And the selection was very good too, at least for a time. For a while, essentially all popular labels were available, excepting only the so-called "major" labels (DG, Decca, Sony, etc), and a few "independent" labels who have traditionally been rather reticent in the download business (Hyperion, DHM, MDG, etc).
The upshot was that almost all the latest releases were available for download in good quality for about $3 a disc. Note also that double albums were often mis-priced as single albums.
Accordingly, I gorged. For the last couple of years I've been buying about 200 albums a year – which is a lot for me – but at $3 per album, that's just $600 for year or $50 per month. Less than I spend on coffee, I'm sure.
Sadly it couldn't last. A few labels were dropped when eMusic switched over to 7digital's content library. Over the last year or so, I've seen more labels disappear, often in groups. But until the beginning of this month, there were enough labels around to keep things interesting. But this month, Naxos and all the many labels they represent also disappeared. Now there are just a very small handful of labels available – Brilliant, Audite, some Supraphon, some Naive – plus a lot of garbage.
I'm still in a bit of shock, frankly, and struggling to adjust. Although I was an early adopter of Spotify, I let my membership there lapse because I preferred the benefits of ownership, even of digital tracks. Recently I've cranked up the Spotify again – and I'm very very impressed with the current selection by the way – but somehow it doesn't feel the same. Also my first impression is that the sound quality is not as good, but I could be wrong.
I will still occasionally buy downloads, but not nearly as much. I can still get Naxos albums for $5 to $6, and most other albums for $10 to $11; but this seems outrageously expensive to me since I'm used to paying just $3 each.
I guess I'm gonna spend more time digesting and enjoying the music I already have. Lord knows I have a lot of music to get to know better.
I realize that very, very few of you are downloaders in the 320 kbps range (anyone?), but I figured I'd share this news and vent my spleen anyway.
This is, after all, the classical downloads thread!
