Emusic is going to obscure the indies with Sony BMG

So I opined on my tech/life blog the other day about SonyBMG screwing the Emusic pooch with the coming of a mostly lame catalog from the behemoth label that has such great chart topping artists like Jefferson Airplane, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Faithless, Kelly Clarkson, Dolly Parton, Judas Priest according to last.fm. Ok I of course like Cash and sorta is like blasphemy or communism not like Elvis but C’mon. Really?

Which if you take a close peak at the metrics on last.fm there it equals 420 Million unique listeners for the combined fans of those groups who scrobble their music from iTunes alone! Holy F*ck batman! That is a lot of freaking band equity. There will invariable be a few issues they will have to deal with this marketing conundrum.
(1) They might start crashing because of the boon of new subscribers. Which in most cases is a good problem to have but much better to grow steadily than over night.
(2) They will or in process of obscuring the indies and fans who have helped build up emusic for the past 7-8 years (see the thread). New music fans take risks with on all these artists because of the low entry cost. Angry user will need to appeased one way or another.
(3) Financially, sorta supporting point above, the indie 00′ band hey day is in serious jeopardy. There is huge set of emerging artists that will be competing with releases older than 2 years. You know that will change once the price point start to turn over fast there could be roll back. These are just mp3s in the over-all scheme of dismal cd sales there are lessons to be learned from the past. Remember the beta and VHS war? Lower quality always wins for mass distribution with right price point (So markety i know). Slowly emusic may (hopefully not) start to obscure these artists for moving volume. If I were them my immediate course of action would be to segregate the “Majors” in the charts like they do in record stores sometimes (remember those?).

Personally, I am going to be on pins in needles as this fiasco unfolds PR nightwares get sorted out. I’m not going to up my emusic subscription and I’m not going to cancel it either. I’ve been a loyal customer since Jan05. It’s still the best deal out there these days and people gotta eat. It will slow my support and consumption of the indies since I’ll only be able to afford on average 3 albums a month as opposed to 5 and half a month in previous plan in this new budget. I would have preferred a subtle 10-20% rent increase but oh’well. Quite a slow down in my music consumption. Again, not that I always downloaded my whole 65 tune subscription previously. Emusic secretly loves that kind of customer with their use it or loose it rule. Which was a great revenue stream for them. Lets see what happens for now there was a Alice Cooper song I wanted to buy… Seriouly it’s bit of sell-out but somebody had to give my only hope is that it benefits all the little guys in the long run or short run. Somehow.