eMusic has been for years the best independent record store on the Internet.  Featuring an enormous catalog of great indie music, I’ve been a subscriber of the subscription-based DRM-free music service for years.  Instead of the pay-per-track iTunes model laden with proprietary DRM, eMusic has always offered music in the MP3 format with lovingly edited meta-data and a recommendation engine frequently the superior to Apple’s.

Formerly your Internet home for independent music

But the real strength of eMusic has always been the selection, chockful of the best independent labels in music.  Arts and Crafts, Fat Wreck, Saddle Creek, Asian Man, SideOneDummy and many more make their entire catalogs available through subscription.  Effectively for the cost of one pop record at Best Buy, eMusic subscribers would get seven records through the monthly $20 fee.

But this week eMusic is announcing the surrender of its indie cred.  Landing a deal with Sony Music Entertainment, new eMusic CEO Danny Stein announced this week the impending availability of every Sony label’s records.  The deal lands some of the biggest names in corporate music including Columbia, Jive, RCA, Arista, and Ruthless.  It is a huge boost to the popularity of eMusic’s offering, which suffers in marquee recognition to iTunes, Rhapsody and MySpace Music.

The deal would seem all roses, except for two eviscerating concessions.  First, the deal covers only Sony’s back catalog – records that are two years old or older.  While the current selection of labels frequently launch exclusive B-sides collections or advances months before records are available in stores, the Sony material will be strictly yesterday’s news.  Second, eMusic is raising prices by over a third.  Where the eMusic Premium $20 subscription would grant the user 75 downloads, post-Sony deal subscribers will only receive 50.

The service’s controversial “no-rollover” policy will also continue.  If you do not download all your tracks in a given month, you lose them.  Subscriptions only renew for the amount of tracks in the plan, leading even the more diligent users to lose significant value for their dollar.

In whole, the Sony deal disserves both the customers eMusic has and the customers eMusic wants.  Two year old records aren’t going to make pop fans switch from iTunes.  Discounts and DRM are not the primary purchase drivers for the teeny-bopping consumer.  

And for their current customers, a 33% price hike in the middle of a recession is hard to swallow, particularly for music most of them never wanted in the first place.  eMusic subscribers are on the service for the broad selection of independent music for a reasonable price. Their customers didn’t come for Boston and Electric Light Orchestra; they’re there to get the Stars record months before its in stores or to buy a leaked Saddle Creek album legally instead of downloading. But this deal makes eMusic more expensive while delivering little value to the existing customer base. Sony has essentially demoted eMusic to a “buy two, get two free” clearance bin.

For fans of the service, it’s like watching Empire Records become a MusicTown.  Because of one short-sighted move, the magic of this Internet record store may be no more.

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