I’ve been a user of eMusic for almost a full year now. Overall, I’ve found it to be a really great service. It’s cheap (I pay something like thirty cents a track), DRM-free MP3 files (192 kbps, variable) and a wide selection of music. However, I’m starting to get really pissed at some things they do (or fail to do).

At times it seems like almost nothing is properly categorized. I understand that in many cases, you can’t really pin down a bands style, but eMusic doesn’t even try. I download a lot of Metal, specifically Black Metal, Doom Metal and its varied sub-genres. I don’t expect eMusic to get that specific, but I find that almost all of this music is classified under “Rock”, which can be argued as somewhat insulting, but they have a Metal category, it’s just not listed there. I find nearly everything I download is categorized incorrectly. I’ll find Death Metal under “Jazz”—shit like that. It makes finding new music you might like a daunting and at times completely retarded experience. To make it more ass-backwards, there has been a number of times where I’ve found bands I like under incorrectly spelled names (rendering it unlikely anyone will easily find them, ever). Tracks are misspelled. Some songs are missing from the album and records from artists who may share the same name are often incorrectly lumped with each other (for example, an album by a Norwegian Jazz ensemble lumped in as being put out by a Suicidal Black Metal group).

eMusic needs to overhaul their website. Things like the ability for users to tag artists would improve the experience immensely. I often get the feeling that the company is a rip-n-post music mill. Some extra care with getting the right info associated with the correct artist is also a key improvement that would be appreciated. Look at what last.fm is doing. Why aren’t they jumping on that user-oriented structure?

Lastly, the customer service is not great. For a while I tried going through the route they have for reporting errors, missing tracks and other easily fixable things. I fired off some polite, “I love your service, but I noticed…” kind of messages and each time, several days later, I’d receive a form response, throwing a few paragraphs of marketspeak drivel at me and that they’d look into it. Nearly a year later, nothing I ever notified them of has been fixed. Pretty much all of my issues were related artists names being incorrectly spelled and I’d include a Wikipedia link to prove it. I wasn’t asking much. I just wanted to be able to find the music I liked. They probably didn’t even read my message and just auto-fired a response.

I don’t plan on quitting eMusic. To date, I’m content enough to warrant keeping the subscription. Still, if they don’t step up to the plate and improve their services, I’m dropping them as soon as I see something I consider to be better. I’m definitely of the persuasion that if a company offers a good product and treats its customers well, you stay loyal to them, but eMusic needs to do a little work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 1:57 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.