eMusic, the 2nd largest legal music download service has decided to cut the number of songs one may download each month as part of their monthly subscription, with the basic, plus and premium subscriptions dropping from 40 to 30, 65 to 50 and 90 to 75 songs respectively. While the monthly subscription pricing remains unaffected, they have cut the pricing of 1 & 2 year plans in order to encourage its subscribers to move to longer contracts.
Since 2003, its music catalogue has grown from 250,000 tracks to 1.7 million tracks and unlike most other legal download services, it is one of the few that does not cripple its music with DRM restrictions or time-locks, which means its customers are free to play their purchased tracks on any MP3 player, including the iPod series as well as write music to CD.
Their new annual rates are $124/year for 40 songs/month, $244/year for 90 songs/month and $359.81/2-year for 90 songs/month. eMusic claims to have 12% of the legal music download market and its 25c per track pricing remains unaffected. It appears that this new monthly cap comes as a result of short-term heavy users who subscribe just long enough to download all the tracks they are looking for and leave, making eMusic more dependant on light users to make up for the costs of "subsidising" the heavy users.
Thanks to GristyMcFisty for letting us know about this news.
