The EMusic Experience

Sholom Sandalow, Friday, January 19, 2007 @ 2:43 pm

I came across a reference to Emusic.com recently while reading an article in Wired magazine.  The article mentioned that Emusic, although a distant second in terms of membership was a strong competitor to iTunes.

  I use iTunes exclusively for downloading music—having realized that the feeling I got when I used the free method was because it was illegal.  But I was intrigued by what Wired mentioned about Emusic.  It had some features that iTunes didn’t: Up to 50 free downloads upon signup, a monthly subscription fee that, if maximized to capacity comes to .33 a download, and the ability to burn Emusic mp3 files onto a CD.

I decided to give it a try.  And what ensued was, in my opinion, a perfect example of the importance of a well designed user experience to the success of a product.   Emusic may offer some features that I can’t get with iTunes, but iTunes makes music consumption and management a breeze, while Emusic, well, just doesn’t.

Before I began downloading music, I had to sign up to Emusic’s service by providing a user name, password and credit card info.  I quickly noticed a lack of clear indication of when my credit card had been billed.  Eventually I did receive confirmation, but not before a little apprehensiveness, and some rather frantic clicking.  As it turns out Emusic works by installing an application on your hard drive, which acts as a sort of decompresser of the proprietary files that download to your desktop from the site.  Only once I finished installing the app and then moved back to the web site did I receive confirmation that I was billed.  It isn’t made clear, though, until the end of the process.

Once registration/installation/billing had finished, I proceeded to try and start downloading my 50 free songs.  The most frustrating aspect of the Emusic experience is finding music.  Both the browse and the search functions are poor.  Browsing titles left me wondering where the user generated content was.  Clicking on the Alternative/Punk link in the Genres section brought up a list of Sub-Genres (defined by who?) as well as a number of “Featured” albums (again, selected by who?).  Nowhere could I find an easy way to get to music I like without it mirroring their grouping model.  So browsing became a trial and error process—the familiar click then back pattern that I’ve become tired of already.

Emusic may
not have any songs by either Pearl Jam or Alice n Chains, but it sure was hard to tell from the search results.  All Three search queries resulted in long lists of artists and bands, which I had to scroll and click through to find a match.  (I didn’t find any matches.)  The site should be intelligent enough to recognize that I only wanted an exact match, and returned 0 results, so I know the site doesn’t contain that artist. 
When I finally found a song I liked, I clicked download, but other than the page refreshing, nothing appeared to have happened.  It took 4 times clicking download, including 2 on another browser I had opened before I had realized that the song file had actually downloaded and was ready to be opened by the Emusic app.  The downloaded Emusic file needed to be converted to an Mp3 in the Emusic app.  Once the file has been converted to Mp3 I was able to listen to it by clicking ‘listen’.  But the app only converts files to Mp3.  It doesn’t play them.  So the song opened in Real Player. 

Lets recap the Emusic experience of finding, downloading and playing songs:  Open Emusic.com in a browser, look (possibly long and hard) for a song, download it to your desktop, open it in the Emusic App, wait for it to convert to Mp3, and then listen to it in Real Music player.  That’s 3 applications I need to move back and forth between, which isn’t an experience I relish doing again.

The itunes experience, on the other hand, is simple, largely because everything can be taken care of—browsing, locating, downloading, playing, Synching with the iPod, and burning CDs (when possible)--in one app. 

Although Emusic has features that iTunes doesn’t, I wont be making the switch anytime soon. For Emusic to become a viable alternative to iTunes, it needs to figure out how to make the user’s experience simple and intuitive.

user experience design

Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   iTunes Store ha a feature that eMusic lacks: DRM!

   DRM is a technology that restricts what you can and cannot do with your purchases. As you mention: you can burn eMusic tracks to CDs. But you can also play it on any MP3 capable device. iTunes and music from the iTunes Store are limited to be burned onto a maximum of 5 CDs, and can only playback on Apple hardware (AppleTV, iPhone, iPod, AirTunes, or through iTunes on your computer). These restrictions restrain you from moving away from your iPod and onto a Cowon iAudio. As your songs only will play on the iPod!!

   iTunes works better and the iTunes store does look and help you find music more easily. But you can never move away from it without loosing all of the music you bought legally from Apple. It’s their music ment for their hardware, not yours.

   Comment by Daniel Aleksandersen, Tuesday, January 23, 2007 @ 1:49 pm

2. 

   I’ve posted quite extensive reply to this post on my blog - http://www.emusicpicks.com/2007/01/23/emusic-vs-itunes/, with trackback to this article, but for some reason it didn’t make it here.

   Comment by Anonymous, Tuesday, January 23, 2007 @ 5:00 pm

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