Great link, Derek and interesting development. Wonder if the indies are planning on setting up shop elsewhere or their own independent platform. Whole bunch of interesting threads at Merge website discussing emusic, with a couple of posts suggesting that a consortium of indie labels could come together. Would love it if they did so. The last line of the lone commenter pretty well sums it up the direction emusic is taking.

What's worse for us non-US clients is that this supposedly massive dump of new music--the whole reason for the change to pricing and exodus of the big indies--is not available for download here. So the sacrifice of the great indie labels gets us zilch.

I sent an email to their customer service asking for clarification on the direction of the service for anyone outside the US but have not heard back yet. I'd guess that at least 50% of my purchases are from those labels. And when I then went for some jazz, half of the jazz I had saved for later (i.e. Miles "Workin' It") are no longer available for download either. Bugged emusic about this on twitter and they insisted that Fantasy/Riverside had not been removed for Canadian users but try searching for either of these labels and you'll find very little left for either. The one example I gave was for Monk's Brilliant Corners which I had saved but not downloaded. They located another copy I could download on Concord Records, which was nice of them to do, but I'm still struggling to find a lot of other stuff that I'm guessing is now gone.

I actually don't mind buying independent music directly from the lable or artists so if I could use my monthly allotment on more established artists and back catalogues that would be fine. But I agree with Derek that it's not looking good.