I could easily have rolled this into yesterday's dispatch but thought it deserved its own entry: after almost exactly four mostly happy years, I've put my eMusic subscription on hold and am likely to walk away entirely in the near future. By the time I first signed up for eMusic, paid MP3 downloads were already on their way out of fashion. I nonetheless have appreciated and enjoyed many facets of the experience: offline access, crazy as it is to say in 2014, is still a boon; the ability to dump transcribables into the software of my choice is highly preferable to wrestling with Spotify; making and tending to my many lists is a vice I'll never outgrow; the motivation to "get into" rather than merely "get through" my purchases, which is a motivation even I need from time to time now that streaming and total access are increasingly the norm, has been good to have; and though eMusic has been infamously secretive about their artist compensation system, certainly more of my money has gone to artists this way than if I had done my repeat listening on Spotify.
I'm jumping ship now because eMusic has, in a move that smacks of desperation, reverted to their original purview of featuring strictly "independent" music, a purview which evidently excludes ECM. Not only is almost all of ECM missing from Spotify, but digital purchases from this label, though they were invariably priced higher than eMusic's default scheme, were significantly cheaper this way than physical media. I am certainly of two minds about all of this since I think eMusic made a big mistake abandoning its mission the first time; and yet unfortunately my sole use for the site over the last couple of years has been access to this "major" label. Now I have three months to think of another one.
And speaking of reverting, I have already begun cleansing myself in the waters of materialism:
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