A new Day for eMusic’s web site?

My last post illustrated one way to figure out where a company like eMusic is going: look at its job listings. This post shows another way: look at press releases from its key suppliers, in this case a release from Day Software Holding AG (a Swiss vendor of content management applications), “CRX to Store, Manage and Exchange information about Artists and Records on Popular Music Site.”

As it happens, this particular news doesn’t seem to have any particular implication for eMusic subscribers, except perhaps to demonstrate eMusic’s investment in creating a reliable high-volume web service. Day’s Content Repository Extreme (CRX) product is a true backend product: As explained in the CRX FAQ, its function is to present a standard interface between the underlying content repository (in eMusic’s case, where all the album and track information is stored) and the front-end content management system (which provides the actual end user interface to the eMusic content). At least in theory this will enable eMusic to change its web front-end (perhaps even migrating to a different CMS) with minimal change to the back-end.

In short, this is really of interest only to the eMusic IT staff. So why the press release? The answer is that enterprise software companies love to have “reference customers” that they can point to when selling to others, so Day was motivated to have eMusic lend their name to a press release. Why would eMusic do this? Probably in exchange for some type of software discount or other concession made by Day. For example, eMusic staff size and revenue would qualify them for the CRX “Standard Edition” pricing, but their number of extranet users and repository items would push them into buying the CRX “Enterprise Edition.” It’s possible that they were able to get the Enterprise Edition for Standard Edition pricing (or close to it) in return for agreeing to do a press release.

A final note: When enterprise software companies use the term “Extreme” in their product names you know that it’s all over in terms of any “cool” factor associated with the term. This is doubly true when it’s a Swiss enterprise software company.