eMusic goes European and increases prices for European customers

August 12, 2006

I have been using the legal mp3 download service from eMusic now for many years as a good source of independent, drm free and affordable online music next to all of my netlabel downloads. Today I received the surprising message from eMusic, that my account has been transfered to Emusic Europe and indeed, on the eMusic site it says eMusic Europe now.

But there is more going on. Not only did they open eMusic Europe, they also increased prices for their European customers as Frank Hecker points out in his blog entry.

(…) The European eMusic Basic price of €12.99 is thus equivalent to $16.68 per month compared to the US price of $9.99. Even if you remove the effect of VAT the European price is equivalent to $14.20, representing a price increase of over 42%. (…)

More details: eMusic prices for the US, UK, and rest of Europe

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One response

eMusic has reacted to some of the criticism (via eMusic

Harald Walker | August 13, 2006

eMusic has reacted to some of the criticism (via eMusic message board):

As you know, we recently launched local European versions of our service. The main benefit in doing this was to make available literally hundreds of thousands of tracks to European customers that we could not (and still cannot) make available from our US site, due to territorial licensing restrictions placed on us by the music owners. The costs of selling music in Europe are higher than in the US, and by launching European sites, we must adhere to national and international laws requiring VAT collection and compensate the various labels, publishers, and artists under the terms they require. As a result of this reality, we were required to make various price adjustments.

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