Cooling Passionate Users
I have praised the online music store, eMusic before and continue to like it. I am still a subscriber and eagerly await my new set of downloads every month. However, a couple of weeks ago, I had an interaction with their customer service department that I wanted to share.
What prompted me to email customer service was the discovery that a band whose music I had downloaded the previous month, Bloc Party, was now no longer on eMusic for download. I figured they had gotten more popular and their label could not reach a new agreement with eMusic. But, I was curious to see what kind of explanation eMusic would give me, so I sent them the following email:
In general I have been thrilled by your service. I have discovered some great new artists and enjoy the clean, easy to use interface of the website.
However, I recently downloaded an album by Bloc Party, Weekend in the City. The album was great and I came back to get their previous album, Silent Alarm. All of the sudden, neither album is available for download anymore.
What happened? Is there any chance Bloc Party will return to eMusic? Is there anything we as fans and eMusic users can do about this?
eMusic responded within 12 hours, which is impressively quick, with the following underwhelming email:
Thank you for contacting eMusic Customer Support.
Unfortunately, the label you referenced is no longer available for download from eMusic. eMusic distributes
music from more than 2000 labels. From time to time, these partnerships end and eMusic must remove the
material from the service. Although we regret having to remove any content, we do
not have full control over these relationships. Our goal is to provide subscribers with the widest variety
of music from top labels and we continue to be extremely aggressive about retaining existing labels
and adding new labels.
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.
Why was this response so underwhelming? Because it is so clearly a form letter style response, with all context lost, which does not do anything to make me as the consumer feel that my comment was really heard. I don't expect a work of fine prose or really much more beyond a form letter response, but even for a canned response, they could have done better with something like the following:
Thank you for being a valued member of the eMusic community. We are glad to hear that you enjoyed the Bloc Party downloads.
Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, we could no longer continue our relationship with Bloc Party's label, Vice Records, and at the present, can no longer offer you any additional downloads for them.
We will continue to be extremely aggressive about retaining existing labels and adding new labels, so perhaps in the future we can offer you Bloc Party downloads again.
In the meantime, thank you for your feedback and you can try to contact Vice Records through their website for more information.
To tide you over, here are what other eMusic community members with similar download histories have been enjoying recently:
This response directly answers all my questions, highlights the rest of the library and music recommendation features of eMusic and in general strikes more of an appreciative and less of a sterile tone. Still a form letter for sure, but it would have brightened my day a little bit.
On a related note, it looks like Bloc Party is now on iTunes, so perhaps the response would have best read, "sorry, we tried, but the 800 pound gorilla in the room kind of won."