Bitches Brew

One of the albums I used for my gripe-fest with eMusic and their new album 'cap' policy was Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. Based on it's historical format as two CDs, and the long jazz tracks, eMusic wanted 24 credits, which for me works out to $9.60.

If you go to the Amazon MP3 entry for the same album, they want $16.99! So why not just pony up the $9.60 at eMusic and quit my belly-aching? Because Amazon will sell me every one of the tracks on Bitches Brew separately. At $0.99 apiece. Buying all seven tracks on the album this way costs me $6.93. It works, because that's what I did last night! So eMusic lost another sale! Will they lose a customer entirely? I still don't know.

I do know that there are currently quite a few albums available, including Sony catalog items, that do not apply the reverse-cap of 12 credits. I have my eye on Patti Smith's Horses and Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man, for instance.

Still, a lot of the jazz albums I had queued went up from two, four, five, etc. credits to 12. In many cases, they were not classics of the field, but rather interesting live albums by name artists, or even artists I'd not yet heard of. Experiments, mostly. Now they are not so attractive as experiments.

Whine, whine, whine... Anyway, I now have Bitches Brew, and the first listen was very fun!