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. ↩