Emusic

Harald Walker wrote me to note that eMusic seems to have changed its past policies regarding how it treats departing subscribers: Maybe something new from eMusic. As far as I know it has been possible in the past to stop the paid subscription for a while and activate it many months later without loosing your account data, which is important if you have to download tracks again (if eMusic still has them) and if you want to keep your lists. . . . ...

Yesterday I happened to read a blog post from Paul Kedrovsky containing some sage advice for companies competing in new markets: “declare victory early and often.” To quote him: Many markets are tippy—they want there to be a market leader—so you can self-servingly help things along by declaring your firm to be the chosen one. It strikes me that that is what eMusic has been trying to do, and with some success. Of course eMusic can’t declare itself to be the overall market leader in digital music—that title being reserved for Apple—but what eMusic has done is to unilaterally declare itself to be “the world’s largest digital retailer of independent music” and (more important) number two behind Apple in the overall digital music market, outpacing Napster, Rhapsody, and the rest. Some interesting points about this strategy: ...

In a comment to his blog post “The strange world of digital music,” Nicholas Carr acknowledges the role that Apple’s proprietary DRM scheme has played in fending off competitors to the iPod, but opines that, “There’s no reason that you couldn’t have a single DRM standard.” Well, yes, and there’s no reason in theory that you couldn’t have a single OS standard. However DRM schemes, like operating systems, are choke points for the respective markets of digital music and IT, and in each case companies are highly motivated to pursue proprietary approaches in the hope that they’ll be the market winners and reap the benefits thereof, including in particular the ability to extract the major portion of the value in that market. Microsoft won that jackpot in IT, and so far Apple has done so in digital music. ...

In the flood of press articles on Microsoft’s recent Zune announcement, I happened to take special note of one that appeared in The Register, titled “The iPod’s Achilles Heel? It’s er. . . Reader’s Digest.” The logic of the article appears to be as follows: Apple doesn’t offer a subscription service for the iPod. eMusic has built a successful digital music business on a subscription model. Microsoft will offer a subscription service for Zune. Therefore Zune will have a competitive advantage against the iPod. Unfortunately the article’s logic breaks down when you look at it closely. Let’s start with the confusion about what the eMusic subscription model actually entails, especially compared to other subscription-based services like Napster To Go. The article refers to eMusic’s “‘Reader’s Digest’ subscription model,” but doesn’t really explain the reference; I’m assuming that the article is using the phrase “‘Reader’s Digest’ subscription model” as shorthand for any model where people pay fixed amounts at set periods for content of some sort (magazines, music, whatever). However an eMusic subscription is very different than a Napster To Go subscription: ...

I’ve been meaning for a while to comment on the Guardian article “A musical tail of hits and misses,” which attempts to address the question of whether the much-discussed “Long Tail” effect actually operates in the real world of digital music services (most notably the iTunes Music Store). Recently David Harrell posted an interesting article “eMusic and the Long Tail” that renewed my interest in this topic and prompted me to get off my rear end and post this. ...