Hypebot seems to engaging in a mild form of eMusic deathwatch lately, this time questioning eMusic’s apparent success in adding new subscribers and labels. At the moment the discussion seems to center around the issue of per-track payouts from eMusic vs. payouts from the iTunes Store and other digital music stores. In particular, the article quotes one label owner complaining that he gets only $0.17 per track from eMusic vs. $0.69 per track or more from other stores. Previously we heard similar complaints from Tony Brummel of Victory Records, questioning why eMusic would want to introduce new subscriber plans offering tracks at $0.25 per download. Hypebot seems to share these concerns: ...

Courtesy of Hypebot’s New Music Business Briefing this week: The mainstream music industry press (in the form of Billboard) talks about the possibility of Amazon entering the digital music market. Some quick points, for those keeping score at home: Hypebot brags that they’ve been out in front on the Amazon story for some time now. Fair play to them, they’ve done a good job of keeping up to date with Amazon-related developments. Billboard revisits the complaints of the major labels that Amazon wasn’t willing to take on Apple with a DRM-based offering. Sorry, folks, I pointed out over a year ago [what a stupid idea that was][what a]"), especially given that Amazon is in business to serve its customers, not the business models of the major labels. As [I predicted][I predi], Amazon has at least been trying to establish price points for a la carte downloads below the prevailing $0.99 per track model (which in turn is based on a wholesale price to labels of $0.70 per track). However Amazon is encountering resistance, and it’s not clear if it will be successful, at least initially. Interesting times. But enough Amazon for now; this is an eMusic blog, so I’ll try to post on eMusic next. ...

Recently I read a post on Chris Messina’s blog about the Yuri’s Night event at NASA Ames Research Center. It sounds like it was an interesting event ("Burning Man Meets NASA,” as Daniel Terdiman of CNET referred to it), and this is one of those times I regret not being a twenty-something living in Silicon Valley. (I could have watched the webcast, but got distracted by other stuff.) Although I can’t comment on the event itself (I’ll leave that to others), I can provide a little historical perspective. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending April 13, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I did this past week: Grants and related activities. I committed to speak at the July 2 meeting of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science group in Atlanta; thanks to Curtis Chong for inviting the Mozilla Foundation to be represented there. I also attended a dinner with members of the W3C WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group (the folks working on WAI-ARIA and related initiatives); thanks to Aaron Leventhal for inviting me and to Tom Wlodkowski of AOL for hosting the dinner. Finally, I worked on some stuff related to the upcoming W4A meeting sponsored by the Foundation. ...

Today Hypebot posted the promised article discussing how Amazon can succeed in the digital music business. Also as promised, I will now comment on Hypebot’s advice and how it compares to [my own][] on an Amazon digital music service"): Be the first major US store to sell EMI in the mp3 format. This advice seems overly short-term: Sure, Amazon might get some initial press for being the first major US store (note the qualifiers!) to enter the digital music market with major label MP3 offerings, but this does not a long-term strategy make. I think it needs to be coupled with something else, and I think that that something else is Amazon having a clear and public goal to be the market-leading commercial provider of digital music in the MP3 format—a goal which in essence amounts to supplanting eMusic as the perceived number two player behind the iTunes Store. As [I’ve written previously][Ive wr] I think this is a realistic goal, and achieving it would pay big dividends for Amazon in terms of market credibility, just as [it has for eMusic][it has]. ...

After exhausting myself making predictions about Amazon and its possible entry into the digital music market, I’m now prompted to return to the topic, prompted by Hypebot’s latest article on why Amazon doesn’t seem to be doing anything yet. I might quibble with some of Hypebot’s stated reasons (e.g., how likely is it really that Microsoft can make a success out of Zune?), but after thinking about it I do agree that an Amazon/eMusic deal doesn’t necessarily make sense, both because of the difficulty in bringing over the eMusic subscription model into the Amazon environment and because Amazon is probably perfectly capable of matching eMusic’s other features on its own (as I noted in my first post on the subject). ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending April 6, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related activities. The Mozilla Foundation is making a grant to Knowbility to support three of their accessibility-related events this spring: the two-part Designation/Codeathon 2.0 and Access U 2007. Next action(s): Make more progress on the action items arising from CSUN and G3ICT. Do a blog post summarizing our accessibility-related efforts, as well as a brief meeting report on CSUN and G3ICT. ...

This is the fourth and final in a series of posts (following parts 1, 2, and 3) speculating on Amazon’s rumored entry into the digital music market. In this post I discuss two additional music-related services Amazon might offer, particularly to customers already signed up to a subscription plan. The standard disclaimer applies: This is all fevered speculation and nothing more; I do not have any inside information about a possible Amazon acquisition of eMusic, nor about other future plans of Amazon or eMusic. Here follows my final attempt to play foolish prognosticator: ...

This is the third in a series of posts (following parts 1 and 2) speculating on Amazon’s rumored entry into the digital music market. In this post I discuss how Amazon might adapt eMusic’s subscription model to its own purposes. To repeat the disclaimer I made previously: This is all fevered speculation and nothing more; I do not have any inside information about a possible Amazon acquisition of eMusic, nor about other future plans of Amazon or eMusic. But enough of disclaimers, on with the wild guesses: ...

In my previous post I speculated how Amazon’s rumored entry into the digital music market (e.g., through a possible acquisition of eMusic) might initiate some changes in the way music is sold online. In this post I make some specific predictions about how Amazon might integrate digital music offerings into its current online store. To repeat the disclaimer I made previously: This is all fevered speculation and nothing more; I do not have any inside information about a possible Amazon acquisition of eMusic, nor about other future plans of Amazon or eMusic. However speculation is always fun, so let’s start imagining the Amazon music store of the future: ...