As is amply clear from recent postings on the eMusic message boards and comments on 17 Dots, eMusic pretty much made a hash of its announcement of the Sony agreement, angering current subscribers not just about the accompanying price increases but also the way in which eMusic CEO Danny Stein’s 17 Dots blog post addressed—or rather, didn’t address—those increases. While I’m quite unhappy about my personal eMusic habit more than doubling in price, I can also see the economic justifications for why eMusic did what it did. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to create a fictional letter to subscribers that Danny Stein might have written in some alternative universe. ...

Well, I significantly underestimated how far eMusic was willing to go in terms of changing its pricing to attract major label content. My personal guess was that Sony demanded a minimum price of at least $0.30 per track, but based on the new US pricing it appears that the new floor is actually $0.40 per track. More specifically, the plan changes are as follows: The eMusic Basic plan is still $11.99 per month, but has been reduced to 24 downloads ($0.50 per song) from the previous 30 downloads ($0.40 per song), or a 25% per-track price increase. The eMusic Plus plan is now 35 downloads for $15.89 per month ($0.45 per song) vs. $14.99 per month for 50 downloads ($0.30 per song) under the previous plan, or a 50% per-track price increase. The eMusic Premium plan is now 50 downloads for $20.79 per month ($0.42 per song) vs. $19.99 per month for 75 downloads ($0.27 per song) under the previous plan, or a 56% per-track price increase. The eMusic Connoisseur plan is now 75 downloads for $30.99 per month ($0.41 per song) or 100 downloads for $40.99 per month (also $0.41 per song) vs. 100 downloads for $24.99 per month ($0.25 per song) under the previous plan, or a 65% per-track price increase. Also, the new Connoisseur plans are available only as upgrades from another plan, and require a minimum 3-month commitment; previously the Connoisseur 100 plan was offered as an option at sign-up time, with no minimum commitment required. People with annual and 2-year plans will be moved to higher-priced plans when their old plans refresh. In my case the default choice offered is to move from my (grandfathered) Basic 2-year plan offering 40 downloads a month for $89.91 per year ($0.19 per song) to a standard Premium Annual plan offering 35 downloads a month for $171.99 per year ($0.41 per song), or a 119% per-track price increase. When downloading at least some complete albums with more than 12 tracks, only the first 12 downloads will be counted against the subscriber’s monthly quota. Booster pack downloads now range from $0.60 per track (when bought in packs of 5 or 10) to $0.50 per track for a pack of 50. I don’t have a complete record of the old pricing, but as far as I’m aware this is not a major change from previously. eMusic is offering a free one-time 15-track booster pack to subscribers who stay with eMusic past July. I’ll have more to say about the overall changes at eMusic in future posts, but for now I wanted to note a few additional points regarding the new pricing: ...

Danny Stein, eMusic’s new CEO, dropped some major news just now on eMusic’s semi-official 17 Dots blog. As reported in more detail in the New York Times, Sony Music Entertainment (home of Arista, Epic, Columbia, and RCA, among others) has decided to release its back-catalog material (anything over 2 years old) to eMusic—basically what eMusic management has apparently been urging them and other major labels to do for ages. (For example, David Pakman addressed this in several of his interviews.) ...

Bob Lefsetz recently published another broadside in his continuing crusade to drag the music industry into the 21st century. In this one he asked the following question: How long until there’s enough unfettered new music, tunes the creators control as opposed to the fat cats, that someone from the outside can roll up these rights and create a viable alternative to the established game? This I think is the key question, since I agree with Lefsetz that industry incumbents are extremely unlikely to innovate, and long copyright terms, existing contracts and statutory licensing arrangements, and political battles over compensation (e.g., regarding performance royalties for terrestrial radio) will slow down if not halt altogether any major revamp of business arrangements for existing works. In particular I doubt we’ll soon see Lefsetz’s preferred “all you can eat for one monthly price” scheme for legalizing P2P downloads of major label content—a skepticism shared by others. ...

Mark Surman has published another blog post about why hybrid organizations matter. I agree with pretty much all of what Mark wrote, and don’t have much to add in general. However I did want to comment specifically on the issue of hybrid organizations “staying true to their public benefit mission,” where Mark writes: This is actually a huge challenge for both traditional non-profits (grantmaker demands trigger mission drift) and social enterprises (can become more about the market than the mission). And it’s somewhere I think hybrids built on the idea of mass participation and peer production have a special advantage. They not only have boards and leaders committed to the mission, but they also have huge communities actively involved in interpreting the mission every day by helping to make something. The aggregate decisions of people who contribute to Firefox, or Wikipedia, or Kiva help shape what these things are in very real ways, which is in turn likely to make sure things stay more or less on mission. This isn’t to say peer production is democracy. Usually, meritocracy is the rule. Still, having a massive number of stakeholders involved in building things helps hybrid orgs stay public benefit focused. ...

One of the blogs I subscribe to is Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao. I came across it as a result of a standing search I have for items related to Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation, and kept reading it because Rao does interesting in-depth posts on various topics of interest to me. His most recent one is on the “discovery of money,” where he asks Do we need to elevate the notion of money from the level of cultural construct, where we created our problems, to the level of universal fundamental, where we might be able to solve them? ...

For this week’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call we’ll be talking about our efforts to expand and revision the education.mozilla.org (EDMO) web site. The discussion will be led by James Boston, our new Mozilla Education intern. For some background on what James will be doing this summer, please see his blog post.

I don’t normally do restaurant reviews, but I thought I’d do a quick one for the Coal Fire Pizza in Ellicott City, since it just opened and I was among the first crowd of folks who ate there. (For other reactions see the post at Howchow.) Basically it’s a nice “upscale casual” place with good pizza and other tasty offerings. It’s a tad expensive if you order a lot (over $70 for three people in our case, without any alcoholic drinks included), but I’d definitely go back. ...

Mark Surman just posted on the topic of “hybrid organizations,” which he defines as organizations characterized by a “mix of social mission, disruptive market strategies and web-like scale and collaboration.” However Mark doesn’t really explain what’s truly “disruptive” about the strategies of hybrid organizations, stating simply that such organizations “use products, services and consumer choice to promote the ideas and move the issues that they believe in.” While Mark is using the phrase “disruptive strategy” somewhat vaguely, I think using it more precisely would have strengthened his argument. Disruptive strategies (or, alternately, “disruptive innovations”) in the sense used by Clayton Christensen and others involve providing goods or services at significantly lower cost to existing users and/or enabling new sets of uses or users for those good and services, and doing so in an economically sustainable way. Thus, for example, although a traditional nonprofit hospital may be a “social enterprise” by strict definition, in practice its business model and cost structure are typically similar to those of traditional for-profit hospitals. A traditional free clinic may provide a service at significantly lower cost to its patients, but its operations are not economically sustainable in the absence of subsidies; its strategy is thus not truly disruptive. ...

I’ve written and published a new proposed high-level strategy for Mozilla-related accessibility efforts. Note that this is not a detailed roadmap for future work, and not a firm commitment to fund or perform such work. Rather it is intended to provide a context within within which we can make overall decisions about where we should concentrate funding and effort. This is especially important because our resources are very much finite, and we will need to make decisions about what we should do and what we should leave undone or leave to others to do. ...