Will eMusic Be Following the RIAAs Lead in 10 Years?
So, Billboard ran an interview with Hilary Rosen, former CEO of the RIAA. I picked it up off TechDirt. Basically, she’s admitting to the RIAA not being aware of the speed of change, the needs/wants of the audience, and the fact that sometimes the first decision that seems easy to make, isn’t always the right or the best decision. One of the most interesting things that she says I’ve copied below:
I think the RIAA became the central organizing vehicle for people’s anger.
This is so true, and it’s something that companies need to be very aware of when they make drastic changes to their policies, or take a strong stance in the face of massive resistance. That’s not to say that hard choices shouldn’t be made, or that strong stances are wrong in and of themselves, but it’s a very important concept.
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Wow, eMusic, you’re really not getting it!
According to this comment, eMusic is now censoring the comments in the epic thread following their blog post I wrote about here. Logn story short, there was a movement afoot in the comments to stage an online protest on Twitter using the hashmarked thread name “#emusicfail”. For those not on twitter, this would make all tweets using that name searchable, essentially linking them all together in (another) massive thread of comments.
Well, eMusic, after claiming the high ground of letting users speak their mind and saying “We read all of your comments”, deleted basically every comment that mentioned the Twitter protest. This threw off the total comment count, re-sorted all the comments so that references to a specific comment number now referenced someone else causing mass confusion, and then they handled the deletions ineptly enough that they got caught, which is the highest crime of censorship!
Shame on you, eMusic.
//UPDATE: Cathy Nevins from eMusic stopped by and dropped a comment to this post. Here’s an excerpt and you can read the full comment in the comments section!
Our Managing Editor Joe Keyes says “Absolutely not, that is not something we would do. We are letting through all comments, positive or negative.” He did note that there is occasionally problems with our CAPTCHA process which may lead to delays in comments going up, and one of our customer service directors mentioned that there is sometimes a problem with caching on browsers that will cause people not to see some posts (sorry I can’t be specific about this but I am not a tech person). Joe also told me that we have no ability to re-number posts – it is technologically impossible.
//UPDATE 2: Great post on the whole situation from the former GM at eMusic here at social-cache.com.
Comments (9)eMusic Seems to Be a Good Place to Start
So, this blog is going to touch on a ton of different topics. Generally what my mind is on when I open the browser. To kick it off, we’re gonna talk eMusic and the Case of the Terrible Decision.
Long story (and longer comment section) short, eMusic signs a deal with Sony to offer some 2+ year old music to their customers and in return they cut the number of downloads their users have in half. Now, if you aren’t familiar with eMusic, then you need to understand that the people that are members of this subscription service are looking for hard to find music that isn’t offered at your more well known outlets like iTunes or Amazon. Now, apparently, you know more than eMusic did when they made this decision.
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