Emusic

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. ...

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 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: ...