Blogging Ottinger (tim)

It’s kind of amazing that it seems a hardship to wait for my eMusic subscription to tick over. I am currently on the 40-songs-per-month plan (soon to reduce to 30 - unhappily).

Forty songs is a lot of music. Before I didn’t buy 5 CDs in a given year. They’re too expensive at over 15 dollars each. I might buy two if they’re on sale for 8 or 6, but I’m largely unaware of sales because the CD rack has fallen off my radar. Face it, those things are probably worth a buck or two for material costs and pressing. At four dollars each, I’m betting the industry would turn a bit of a profit — enough to make many other industries jealous. There’s more effort in producing a four-color comic book, and just as much copyrighted material, and those things are a two dollars each. Imagine if the latest Superman cost you $12.00 — who would buy it? I think collecting would be over. Let’s not even talk about the DRM and the unsavory RIAA practices. Just in terms of real value (ignoring rootkits and politics) the CD really is a loser.

But forty songs? That’s at least 3 cds. Three CDs and some extra every single month. I would never buy 36 CDs in a year. But here I am, many CDs-worth richer in music and I can hardly wait for the counter to tick over and give me my download credits for another month. I will be consuming more for-pay music than ever in my life, including those long-ago teen years. Why?

One reason is price. The subscription is very reasonable. For an amount that I won’t spend all at once for one cd at the local Mall Wart, I get my pick of the catalog and 40 songs. It is easy to spend the money when the value is there. I have even developed a new hobby (like I need a hobby) of listening to the other bands in the eMusic catalog, since I’m not investing too much. They’ve rekindled my interest in commercial bands a bit. I am now listening to bands I’d almost forgotten (like Triumph), and sharing them with my kids.

The other reason I’m doing this is that eMusic has good policies. They promise me DRM-free MP3 files that I can copy to my computers and my mp3 players and burn on CDs. As a result, I can listen to the music the way I want to. This is what the market wants. I want it so much that I’m finally buying music again, something I had stopped doing. And unlike eMusic’s larger competitor, I can re-download a file without buying it again. If I lose my player, or my laptop dies, or both get stolen, I can refresh the music collection on another computer and keep going. That is the way to go.

Mind you, I’m still interested in free music. I enjoy the stuff I get from iRate and from the various podcasts (like Amplified), and I am still interested in digging through the catalog at MagnaTunes for stuff I can buy and use (another company with reasonable pricing and good policies).

But I think that some people in the industry are getting the right idea, offering good policies for reasonable prices. This is what the market wants. This is what the savvy services will find ways to provide. This is why eMusic is the #2 for-pay download site, behind only iTunes. This is why I can’t wait to get my next downloading fix, and have over 20 albums listed in my “for download later” music list.

And yet, I have to wait. It can’t get here soon enough.

ps: Doesn’t it seem ironic that a scheme to prevent music playing should be called PlaysForSure? Maybe it should be called “PunishForSure”?