Now that I'm a disgruntled ex-eMusic customer, I've been playing around with other music sites. Via the enigmatic Bankai, I was introduced to thesixtyone, and it provides some of the things I dream of in a music economy. Most notably, artists actually get most of the money.

On thesixtyone, artists sell their music directly to their fans. Unlike a record or distribution deal where they only make $1-2 per album (if they ever get paid, that is), artists on thesixtyone make at least $7 per album and are paid every 30 days -- no wait for recoupment and no complex royalty schemes!

The site is attractive, relatively easy to use, under active development, and slightly buggy. They seem very responsive to bug reports, so I'm confident things will get better and better.

As individual artists rather than labels upload music, the music selection is nowhere near as wide as what was available at eMusic (I spits on the Sony deal). But I've still managed to find quite a bit of stuff to enjoy, my current favourite being thecitylights. You can "heart" music you enjoy, and if the song becomes popular (hearted by others) you get reputation. They've also got a clever "Quests" system, things like "listen to recently uploaded music", that earns you hearts and reputation. I'm finding it slightly addictive, though I'm not really sure what you do with reputation.

thesixtyone has a Flash music player, and lets you navigate around the site and the music keeps playing, which is great. Unfortunately, it does this by intercepting clicks, so that the URL doesn't reflect where you are in the site, so you can't bookmark things directly.

Music can be bought with a credit system. I haven't bought any yet, and I'm not sure what the pricing is, so we'll see how that compares to other sites when I do.

Overall, I'm hopeful thesixtyone will be meeting at least some of my music needs for a while to come. Go and sign up and play around, and tell them michaeltwofish sent you.

I logged in to eMusic recently to find this message:

In July, your eMusic plan will change. Please read the announcement for details on how this change affects your account.

Oh, yeah, my year is up. I guess my plan will go up in price a bit. Well, I'm paying $US12 a month for my 50 downloads now, so going up a few bucks is fine. On to the details.

On your next account refresh Jul 5, 2009, your plan will change to the new eMusic Bi-Annual 210 plan, which gives you 210 downloads for $95.90 every 180 days.

It took me a little while to absorb that. Let's convert it into the same units as I was paying. 180 days, let's call that 6 months, so $95.90/6 = $US16 a month, and 210/6 = 35 downloads a month. Oh, they did offer a 15 download booster pack, which means I'd get one more month at the same number of downloads.

Right. Okay. So the new plan new plan gives me 30% reduced service for 30% higher price. I'm actually not very happy about that. I'm not making any judgment about whether it's a reasonable deal, that's not the point. Such a drastic change to my existing terms is just unreasonable.

When I contacted eMusic to tell them I would have been happy with a price rise, even of 30%, but that such a significant change was very disappointing, I got a mostly canned response¹ telling me the terms of the new plan, "we truly value loyal customers," and the reason for the change was to:

... enable us to better compensate all of our labels, plus add new content from Sony starting in July, and even more new labels in the future.

I've had no problem finding any amount of music I like, so the addition of Sony thrills me not at all. If the new plan was what was available when I originally signed up, I might have been happy, but that's not the case. It's like a car salesman doubling the price after the test drive².

eMusic may well be the cheapest way to find music, but they've lost my faith. I cancelled my subscription this morning and started looking elsewhere for music.

[Update: I'm not the only one annoyed. Complain.]
[Update: According to the press release, the new tracks will only be available to US subscribers anyway. All class.]

1. I know it was canned because I got the same reply when I emailed back. ↩
2. Ok, so it's not really like that, it's more like a hire drive deal where ... oh forget it. ↩

Michael recently suggested that I have a look at eMusic. I had a bit of a play around, worked out the pricing, thought it sounded like a reasonable deal, and signed up.

When Michael asked me about it a few days later, I told him I'd already signed up. Another friend mentioned that they have a recommendation service, and that by signing up directly rather than through the service, Michael had missed out on 50 free songs. Though Michael tried to convince me it didn't matter, I decided to contact eMusic to see if they could still credit the songs.

It took a couple of emails back and forth but once I'd adequately explained what was going on, I got this response.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting eMusic Customer Support. I have credited Michael's account for the 50 downloads. Thanks for being an enthusiastic eMusic subscriber.

Simple and to the point. I am enthusiastic.