Christmas, for me, traditionally comes on the 28th. Of every month. That’s when I flip open my laptop, check the calendar, and get the rush that comes from remembering that eMusic has automatically refreshed my 100-download “Connoisseur” subscription. Awaiting me on the site is the comfort of knowing there’s plenty of stuff I want – starting with the 134 albums that (as of this writing) constitute my “Save for Later” list – and the excitement of knowing there must be oodles of stuff I don’t even know I want. And because the downloads come so much cheaper from eMusic than they do from Amazon or iTunes … and because I never look closely enough at my credit-card bill to notice that the site has been making my bank account 25 bucks lighter every month … I can grab that Sarabeth Tucek album I’d never heard of until just now, listen to it once or twice before filing it away on my external drive, and still imagine that I’ve gotten something for (practically) nothing.

That convergence of low cost and a sense of discovery – i.e., the willingness to take a chance on something new and unknown because the financial risk is relatively low – traditionally has been a big part of the lure for eMusic’s subscriber base. But that equation has changed over the last couple of weeks, as the site has significantly raised its subscription rates as part of the deal it recently struck with Sony Music Entertainment. The agreement is the first that eMusic has been able to reach with a major-label conglomerate, and on July 1 it resulted in a massive infusion of well-known music to the site’s catalog – just in time for subscribers to join the dogpile on Michael Jackson recordings, which quickly shot toward the top of the site’s download charts.

Those downloads, however, now come at 40 to 48 cents a (king of) pop, depending on the subscription, rather than the 25 to 35 cents they did just a month ago. (In order to soften the blow a bit, eMusic has instituted a new “album pricing” system that enables users to download some – but only some – full albums at rates cheaper than the site’s former track-by-track policy would have allowed.) This shift inspires a certain ambivalence; it’s nice, for example, to think that indie labels and their artists will receive higher royalties now, because what has traditionally been a “steal” for eMusic subscribers has also been something of a steal from those acts. (more…)