Excuses, Excuses

  A long gap between posts I'm afraid. Brought on by the busyness of business, but there have been some goings on in music recently that I felt compelled to comment on so...

Bill Nelson

No secret that Bill is a huge favourite of mine. He is also someone who seems to reflect the ever increasing trend to stumble into the future focussed relentlessly on the past. He writes a regular journal on his website. the latest (as I write) is here. Bill is producing more and better work than he has ever done but is again being forced to revisit work that he regards as juvenalia - Be Bop Deluxe were a good band but a recent article in Shindig and doubtless the upcoming one he refers to in Classic Rock will pick over their bones and pass over the subsequent 40 years and hundreds of recordings with barely a nod. I sympathise with Bill and wish that he and other artists could be allowed the spotlight for their current work that it deserves.

I suspect (as from his comments I think Bill does as well) that the power of Facebook may have helped sell this event out in record time, and given that the Facebook groups that helped the sell out seem to have the same myopia about anything other than Be Bop Deluxe, then he may be right that there will be some disappointed fans clutching armfuls of 70s LPs to be signed. This means that many of his very loyal current following go without, me included. While I think some of the comments being expressed on the website message board are a little OTT, it would be nice for Bill to have a supportive crowd, especially if there is a question mark over him playing live again.

Over The Rhine

Another favourite. Sometime ago they did a a crowd funder covering three new albums. While I'm of the persuasion that would listen to Karin Bergquist sing a shopping list, I was pleased to see that there will be a new piano album from Linford included. I recently bought the only one of his earlier ones that I didn't have, "Unspoken Requests" and it's now a fixture on the iPod. If you don't know about Over The Rhine, catch up here. Hopefully more shows in the UK at some point. St Georges Hall in Bristol would be a great venue for them. HINT!

Steely Dan

Or the Donald Fagen band as it should really be now. While I could care less about current goings on, the hope that DF's chase for dollars will also include some expanded reissues and some more proper live albums, rather than bootleg radio shows, is on. As a side note Jazz Journal, which I read occasionally, but is very much stuck in 1966 made a comment in it's blurb for last months issue that Steely Dan had no place in a Jazz magazine. Oh come on! Surely we are past that! The irony that this comment was supporting an interview with guitarist Steve Khan (Aja, Gaucho) and that elsewhere in the magazine was a report on new interpretations of some of Donald's songs and a feature on Chris Potter, stalwart of the 90s band is clearly lost on whoever wrote that.

EMusic

I have winged about the demise of this once great service before, but have finally paused my membership to give it three months to get it's act together. Not going to happen I'm afraid but as most of my saved for later list disappeared months ago, and Frontiers Records vanished in September I struggled to use up my allocation last quarter. So bye bye EMusic, fun while it lasted.

There got that off my chest, back to work.

eMusic - An Update

I have just published an update on my August rant about eMusic. Find it on Linkedin HERE

Why I'm giving up on eMusic

I joined eMusic in 2005. If you don't know eMusic it is a subscription based music download service. The content is sourced mainly from independent labels,with a lot of catalogue secured, until recently, through The Orchard & CD Baby.

In my Linkedin articles recently I have been looking at the way companies disregard their customer base leading to loss of said customer & ultimately the business. eMusic make a great object lesson in what not to do, so here are some of the ways that a once great service has been brought down, and left me and many others throwing up our hands and saying "ENOUGH".

Play Pass The Parcel With Your Business.

 eMusic was launched in 1995, that's four years before iTunes. Since then it has been variously owned by its founders, Vivendi (French media company), JDS Capital Management (venture capital), and was most recently acquired in 2015 by TriPlay an Israeli cloud computing company. Each time senior management was changed and from the number of people listing eMusic as a past company on Linkedin, staff left in droves after each takeover. The upshot of this of course was a lack of expertise, continuity or direction in the business leading to...

Frequent Changes in Business Model and Direction

Or, how to confuse your customers. With content rooted solidly in independent music and strong catalogues in Classical, New Age and other niche areas eMusic had a great USP, something that allowed it to stand apart from the fights between iTunes and the big labels. Then in 2009 the majors, Sony, then Warners and Universal crept onto the site, in the USA at least. The then CEO however stated in The New York Times "the future of eMusic, like its past, is in pursuing not the fickle mainstream but the passionate fringe". The U.K. store stayed with the independents, presumably due to rights issues.Then in 2014 the major labels disappeared again. There was a renewed commitment to the independent arena. With new owners came another shift to sourcing catalogue from 7Digital, meaning that on the site's relaunch in May 2017 much of the content disappeared, again presumably due to rights issues. Each relaunch was of course accompanied by new branding. An image search on Google brings up 9 different logos.

Something to Tempt The Buyer...

7Digital don't appear to distribute a number of the best known independent labels, Warp & Eagle Rock have gone completely and Rough Trade have only 27 albums on the site for instance. There are no meaningful new releases, oh there is new music every week, mostly obscure compilations, bootleg live albums and out of copyright jazz and classical. The customers want the new releases they hear on the radio and read about online or in the magazines, and which were always on the old version of eMusic. For me notable absences are the latest Public Service Braodcasting album (they have everything else from them so why not this?) and the new Peter Perrett album which they are advertising but, at least in the U.K. is not available to buy. I could go on, other customers are on the Emusers forum. One of my main labels of interest Frontiers (Italian based so no U.S.rights clashes I guess) is still adding new content so it can be done.

Ignore The Customers And Hope They Go Away 

The @emusichelps Twitter has been silent since 9th May. the main @emusic one posts a couple of hopeful items per month and the old noticeboard died with its website. The main means of communication is through a Reddit page meaning that the posts about poor customer service, disappearing content and departing customers are hidden away, out of sight, out of mind. The new website looks ok and does fix a few problems from the old one, but is very hard to navigate, and searching for anything specific is now a lot harder, assuming you can find anything in the first place. Oh and integration to iTunes has gone as well.


There may be legitimate reasons for the problems, new websites have issues I recognise that, but if eMusic are working away in the background to solve the problems, they aren't telling the customers. And they need to; soon, while they still have a business. If they aren't doing anything because the switch to 7Digital's platform has fundamentally broken the business, then own up to it, and start fixing it.

The obvious take away from all this is that this weeks owners neither understand or care about their customer base. The community aspect of eMusic expressed through various forums was one of its strengths. The fact that it appealed to the music obsessive (me!) who wanted to dig into the site and find long forgotten albums and new obscurities was another. The decision to move to 7Digital was clearly made on a cost basis and seems to sum up the whole "relaunch". It won't do eMusic, It won't do.

Postscript

I have just been sent a user satisfaction survey by email. You can guess how it went, but the concerning thing is that the headline "we are thinking about doing this" items were Hi Res audio (good), major label content (see above), and connectivity to smart watches, TVs and car radios. There's something about fiddling while Rome burns here I feel...