I just started my subscription to Emusic again. Emusic is one of the biggest site for indie music download sales, and works on a subscription model, so you pay for a certain number of tracks a month. I get 50 tracks for £11.99, I think.
My music’s been up on Emusic for quite a while, and a fair chunk of the money I get from cdbaby for download sales is from the site. I’ve heard a fair few people in the industry complaining about the service, saying the royalty rate is too low. This article from Hypebot spells out a lot of the complaints, but in so doing, just demonstrates how much of a better position those of us who do our own music/marketing/promotion/writing etc. are in this sphere…
But anyway, the criticisms are fair enough, though on balance I’m a fan of the service. I discovered a lot of great music through it before I unsubbed last time (I left due to having more new music than I had time to listen to!) and now that I’m back on it, I’ve finding that LOADS more labels and artists are on there, including, amazingingly, ECM.
So here’s the list of what I spent my first month’s 50 tracks on:
- Terje Rypdal – Waves
- Jason Feddy – Connected
- Renaud Garcia-Fons – Arcoluz
- Iain Archer – Magnetic North
- Charlie Haden/Egberto Gismonti – In Montreal
- Jan Garbarek – Wayfarer
My current complaint about the site is that a lot of the artist names are really screwed up on the site – I missed downloading the latest David Torn record, Prezens, because it’s listed under the name of the keyboard player on it, Craig Taborn, with no mention of David! Hopefully they’ll get that straight soon enough…
For you lovely readers, though, you should certainly visit the page for my solo stuff on emusic.com – download at your leisure 🙂