Dear emusic …
Dear emusic:
I’m fairly new to the service … and love the alternative angle. I’m not overly amused, however, that I’ll have to pay .10 cents or more per track (per emusic’s new pricing policy) to accommodated a number of newly acquired mainstream tracks by folks like … Michael Jackson. Sure, Miles Davis is cool. But Michael Jackson?
I would be willing to pay .10 cents more to accommodate more German rock bands from the 1970s … or maybe Captain Beefheart … but I’m not sure it’s fair to boost the price of cool off-beat music (which is mostly what I’ll keep downloading) … to accommodate Bruce Springsteen and the Dixie Chicks.
If you told me that my extra cash was going to artists like Sufjan Stevens and record labels like Kill Rock Stars … I’d happily fork over .15 extra cents per track … but my guess is that the extra money–.10 or more cents for every track–will be going into the coffers of companies like Columbia … So if I keep the service and keep downloading the same kind of tracks (the ones that emusic was making a profit from at .30 cents a track), I’ll be helping to support lots of big labels that support lots of crappy music.
How ’bout a new pricing system that matches musical tastes? We can have the Hipster Plan that allows cool people to keep downloading alternative music at .30 cents a track … and then we can have the Middle of the Road Plan that charges .50 cents per track for the less imaginative listener who cannot afford iTunes.
I could go on ….
