No more eMusic

Well, today was the end of eMusic for me. I was planning to cancel prior to the changeover to the new service on Nov. 8, but I wanted to grab as much stuff as I could before canceling. Today I got kicked off the service, guess they didn't like the fact I'd logged 10,000 or so downloads over the weekend. I of course expected to get kicked since it's well known that the unlimited service wasn't really unlimited, so oh well. The only thing I'll miss is the pleasure of writing some nice comments criticizing their idiotic change of direction when I finally canceled the account.

eMusic was a great service, I'm truly disappointed to see the spirit sucked out of it like this. I subscribed for over a year and prior to their unfortunate sale, had no plans to ever stop. I'm still absolutely convinced that they could have found a more balanced rate structure that would have increased their revenues without completely destroying what made the service great.

In my time with the service I probably downloaded 20,000 tracks and I'll be enjoying them for many years to come. It's hard to go from being such a huge fan of the service to outright disgust at the whole situation. eMusic did an absolutely horrible job of handling this transition in a way that would maintain the loyalty of their existing customers. From the cowardly act of removing the discussion forums, censoring the lists used for protest and the change of the service from having real humans involved to a faceless entity it's almost like they wanted to drive away their current customers. Who knows maybe they did, if so it worked. Absolutely disgusting.

Posted by Kimbro Staken