I’ve been a member since 2005, and prices have risen several times in the interim. The nice thing is, those price hikes only affected new accounts: old accounts like mine are kept on the old pricing, even across changes like this. (In this case, they’re awarding “bonus credit” to puff my plan up to the same number of 49c downloads as I get now.)² Which leads to the following:

More bonus than payment? Cool!

Far as I can see, that means I’ll be getting my tracks for just over 20c each, instead of 50. There’s not many times being an early adopter really pays off, but this seems to be one of them!

Notes:

1. Why, eMusic, why 49? Why not 53? Or 47? Or (gulp) 50?
2. Variable pricing is going to mess with this, of course. I presume they’ll stick with “a track is 49c” for plan pricing, but of course variable pricing is only going to introduce tracks above, not below, that line.

That is, they’ve shown up on the European site (they’re German, although you wouldn’t guess it from listening), with slightly different punctuation and case (I’m taking the regrettable .bb from their site — apparently it stands for “big band”) but the same glorious sound. The new album, The Exile Itch, isn’t there, but three older albums are (Alligator Soup, 29 Moonglow and Introducing the Mighty Three).

I’m an eMu member since before they raised prices, and I’m not sure I’d pay what they’re asking now. But if you’re already a member, rock on over and check these guys out. There used to be plenty of free downloads on their site, but they seem to have vanished (apart from four tracks from the new album). Grrr! If you can find ‘em, I recommend “Down Down Down” and “Dark Days” as an introduction to their sound. Bet you can’t keep still listening…

I’m quite sure the company eMusic owns the domain emusic.com, but anyone at all could register chtah.com and add a subdomain called emusic. If this is really the new eMu mailing system then they should be slapped about for encouraging their users to ignore all reasonable security precautions.

(How did I notice? I whitelist: any mail from an address I haven’t previously confirmed goes into a separate folder and gets looked at suspiciously. Double-suspiciously when it purports to come from somebody I know I have already whitelisted.)

If it’s not them, though, then I’m worried. Because the mail looks perfectly legitimate, properly punctuated and in fact it’s an html email in pretty good eMu style. That’s professional work. It addresses me by the name eMu knows me by, which could be a lucky guess but at least means it’s either personalised by hand or run off a smarter database than just crawling my homepage and scraping names-and-addresses.

I’ve sent a mail to the eMu folk, but their “Contact Me” form doesn’t fill me with confidence. In the meantime, if anyone knows more about the issue I’d be glad to hear it.