In my previous post I discussed the difficulties that independent labels were having in adapting to the new landscape of the music business, and whether eMusic management was being sufficiently sensitive to that fact in their dealings with labels. Beyond the emotional aspects of the indie labels’ issues with eMusic and the music business in general, there are also some serious questions as to whether the current eMusic model is an overall plus or minus for labels. There seem to be three related but distinct concerns here: ...

I previously commented on the Billboard article about labels’ unhappiness with eMusic, although I got some of the facts of the article wrong—an obvious reminder that I need to sleep on eMusic news before writing about it. The article was the subject of much comment on the eMusic message boards, to which I contributed in a small way. Having had some time to think since then, I’m ready now to expand my comments. ...

David Pakman (CEO of eMusic—but you already knew that, right?) has traditionally confined his public comments to press interviews. However in the wake of reports about some labels being dissatisfied with eMusic, Pakman has chosen to bypass the press and take his case directly to eMusic customers using 17 dots, eMusic’s official unofficial blog. His points are pretty much what you’d expect: customers don’t want DRM, they do want music to be less expensive, and the music industry needs to recognize these facts and adapt to them. I’ve previously commented on these points, and will do so again, but I thought for this post it’s more interesting to look at the why of Pakman’s post as opposed to the what. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 4, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I did this past week: Grants and related activities. I completed paperwork on two more accessibility-related proposals. Next action(s): Finish paperwork on the grant proposals resulting from the Summer of Code submissions for which we didn’t have slots. Do a blog post summarizing our accessibility-related efforts, as well as a brief meeting report on CSUN and G3ICT. ...

I don’t normally do breaking news, because frankly I’m just too busy to keep track of what’s happening every day in the music business. However I’ll make an exception just this once given its potential importance: Billboard (in a story picked up by the Washington Post) is reporting that three out of eMusic’s top six 60 labels are considering pulling out of the service either wholly or partially (i.e., not offering newer releases). According to eMusic’s label page, the top six labels by downloads are Merge, Naxos, Matador, KOCH, Anti, and Fat Possum. Given its focus on low-cost offerings I think we can conclude that Naxos will not be among the defectors. Also, it’s possible that Fat Possum will be one of the defectors, since otherwise the story would have read “three out of the top N” where N was some number other than six. Hypebot previously named KOCH as being unhappy, so it may be a second defector. I don’t have time now to speculate which of Merge, Matador, or Anti might be the third. (OK, it’s clear now why I don’t do breaking news: because I can’t even read the breaking news articles, and make stupid mistakes like mistaking 6 for 60.) ...

Now that I’ve done a lengthy eMusic-related post I feel less guilty about doing yet another post on Amazon and its rumored plans to enter the digital music market; in particular I wanted to highlight two (relatively) recent articles on the topic. From the “pro” side of the fence (i.e., someone paid to have opinions and publish them) comes an article “Why Amazon is Important” by Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research. (Incidentally, Mulligan blogs a lot about digital music but has mentioned eMusic only a few times, mostly in passing.) Mulligan refers to Amazon as the “sleeping giant of the digital music market” and notes that ...

Reading a post by Clay Shirkey concerning Scott McCloud’s abandoning the use of micropayments, I (re)discovered a 10-year-old article by Nick Szabo on mental accounting costs (a topic I touched on briefly in my previous post). It’s a bit dense, but the key paragraph is worth quoting: The function of prices, from the point of view of a shopper, is to let the shopper map his personal resources (budget) to his personal values (unique and not directly observable). This mental process requires comparison of the purchase price of a good to its personal value. This entails a significant mental cost, which sets the most basic lower bounds on transaction costs. For example, comparing the personal value of a large, diverse set of low-priced goods might require a mental expenditure greater than the prices of those goods (where mental expenditure may be measurable as the opportunity costs of not engaging in mental labor for wages, or of not shopping for a fewer number of more comparable goods with lower mental accounting costs). In this case it makes sense to put the goods together into bundles with a higher price and an initutive [sic] synergy, until the mental accounting costs of shoppers are sufficiently low. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending April 27, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I did this past week: Grants and related activities. I completed paperwork on one of the new accessibility-related proposals. Henri Sivonen completed the second milestone on his HTML5 conformance checker prototype project. I took care of various items related to expenses for CSUN and the W4A conference. ...

It’s unseemly to gloat that “I told you so,” but I’m not being paid for this gig so I’ll take my satisfaction where I can find it: According to a Digital Music News report on Amazon’s plans (free registration required), Amazon will be integrating its much-rumored digital music offering into its existing CD-centric online store: MP3s from participating artists will be blended into the larger, existing Amazon store. “They are not trying to replace iTunes, iPod, Zune, whatever,” one source said. “It’s going to look just like Amazon does today.” That means that a search for an artist will yield a number of results, including CDs, merchandise, DVDs, and MP3s if available. ...

In a previous post I offered some pretty snarky advice for indie labels complaining about eMusic per-track payouts. For this post I ’ll try to look at things in a more objective manner and consider why eMusic does business the way it does, and why eMusic’s approach is arguably better for labels than various alternatives. In particular I’ll address the business case for eMusic offering its new Connoisseur plans, since that was apparently one major bone of contention between eMusic and Victory Records. As Tony Brummel of Victory famously said with regard to the Connoisseur plans, “I just don’t believe in what they’re doing.” He may have lost his own faith in eMusic, but perhaps I can justify it to others. ...