bye bye emusic.com

iTunes younger, cheaper, cooler cousin is no longer very young, very cheap nor very cool.

What with the creeping prices the leaking of indies and embracing of mainstream, eTunes… i mean emusic  has just become a smaller, cheaper, crapper version of iTunes.

I’ve bailed after finding less and less of your catalogue appealing each month I was struggling to actually fill my (much diminished for the money) download quota.

 

What started out as a really cheap, risk free way of finding new bands became a much less cheap way of wading through mounds of crap, old music to discover the occasional gem.

Neither am I a diamond miner, nor am I a long-tail cool-aid drinker so I’m afraid I’ve had to say good bye after a fun (at first) five years…. I kept holding out on the hope that one day you would come to your senses. But you never did, so I guess it’s…

 

…Good Bye Emusic…

 

emusic download manager blues and repurchasing

emusic is really starting to take the piss. Price hikes and monthly song quota cuts has already dented its once proud image as “iTunes’s younger, cooler brother.”

Now we have a site with buggy, sub standard download software and a policy which aims to make you repurchase tracks that have failed to download fully.

OK, so what happened?

I clicked on the download button, and the album started to download. (Much slower than it used to, I might add.) I then paused the download momentarily by accident (clicking the pause button).

When I clicked resume, it resumed from the next song! I now had two 30 second snippets. Nonplussed, I cancelled the download in the hope that I could restart it… Nope

Going back to the website, I found that there was no longer an option to complete your album… I’d have to pay the whole $6 to download the whole album again!

It’s a download site, for fuck’s sake and they’re charging me PER DOWNLOAD, when it’s THEIR SOFTWARE THAT’S BROKEN.

I really think that this time, I’m done with emusic.

For reference, here’s the mail I sent to their customer support… Not my most eloquent prose, I must admit.

"To whom it may concern"
I paused the download.... when I resumed, 
it tried to download the next track... 
I now have four half downloaded tracks....
I thought if I cancelled the downloads,
and reselected them manually I'd be ok...
but IT SAYS I ALREADY DOWNLOADED THE TRACKS.
With the OPTION OF REPURCHASING (WHAT THE F***?!)
ARE YOU KIDDING!
This is not good enough... You are not iTunes,
the only thing you have going for you is that
your prices are cheap... If you can't make a
system as painless as iTunes you will
go out of business.
Please let me redownload the songs which I paid
for but now don't have.
The album is
http://www.emusic.com/album/modwheelmood-Pearls-to-Pigs-MP3-Download/11475231.html

It says I have 7 tracks but I don't.
I'm getting sick of music's draconian "REPURCHASE"
policies requiring me to justify my existence
every time you have a bug in your software.
Yours, Disgruntled,

Craig Lloyd.

Music Listening Habits – Visualised

As much as I like the charts available on Last FM <- see my charts here, I was looking for something a little more visual to depict my listening habits, just for my own amusement.

I’ve found just the tool called rather catchily, “Last FM Extra Music Stats.Exe” for download (Windows Only!!!). What it does is gather the stats on your listening habits and create pretty wave graphs from them.

If you’re not familiar with wave graphs, they are basically a cumulative chart showing trends over time.

Here are two of the charts it produced. Click to enlarge.

My Top 20 artists of 2008

My Monthly Top Five Artists

After March, nearly all of the artists listed are ones I have discovered through EMusic and Last FM! I think taht’s a real testiment to the power of these new media sites. It’s now been nearly two years since I have bought CDs (The Complete Pixies Collection).

Just to show how complex these wave graphs can get, here’s my top 100!

My Monthly Top 100 Artists of 2008