Today eMusic launched a full site redesign incorporating a whole big bunch of social media tools. From the release:
Beginning today, eMusic customers will not only see album information and tracklisting on the page, they will see imported content from YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia for the artist whose music they are exploring.
It also includes Flickr and YouTube developer APIs and a browsing widget — opening the doors to things to come.
Unfortunately, what makes eMusic so great (even before this revamp) still holds them back from earning me as a paying customer. So all I’ll ever see is this log-in screen at the homepage.
Unlike Napster and Rhapsody’s subscription services, eMusic’s mp3s aren’t riddled with DRM, can be shared on any music player, can be saved even if you stop paying eMusic’s monthly fee and can be burned onto CDs. But this move has kept the Big Four record labels out of their catalog.
So while I applaud eMusic for adding in social media elements to their existing business model, let me take the opportunity to further chastise the RIAA for their broken, archaic system of DRM and flooding p2p networks with illegitimate files. BOO.
