Emusic

Courtesy of Google News I found an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal apparently about a new Naxos initiative in partnership with eMusic. It’s behind the subscriber wall and (as a non-subscriber) I couldn’t see the full text, but I managed to get the following tidbit: On Tuesday, classical label Naxos will unveil a dozen new albums in a line it’s calling MPkey. The albums are packaged in CD-sized boxes and will be placed on store shelves at Borders. Inside each box, however, customers will find not a CD but a card with an access code and a booklet of instructions for downloading the album from eMusic. ...

In a prior post a while back I talked about how job postings were useful clues to what a company’s up to. Well, I found some more eMusic job postings, courtesy of the ever useful Digital Music News; there are not many clues to eMusic’s future, but it’s always interesting to see what’s involved in running eMusic. Here are the current positions (warning: as these positions are filled I’d expect the URLs to stop working): ...

Really, everyone getting excited about SpiralFrog’s announcement should just stop reading fevered pronouncements like “a huge blow to established music stores such as iTunes, eMusic, and Urge” and see what Bob Lefsetz has to say: Rental, and make no mistake, SpiralFrog is rental, it’s just that you pay for it with your eyeballs/time as opposed to cash, has been proven to be a failure. . . . ...

This is the second in a series of posts about eMusic’s pricing strategy. (See also part 1.) In this post I discuss the possible motivations behind eMusic’s price points for the various subscription plans and booster packs, and including selection of the price points and the spacing between them, selection of per-track prices, and the use of “.99” prices. As every eMusic US subscriber knows (or should know), the three subscription plans offered by eMusic in the US are $9.99 for 40 tracks, $14.99 for 65 tracks, and $19.99 for 90 tracks. I suspect that eMusic first chose $9.99 and $19.99 as psychologically attractive price points, and then interpolated $14.99 as the “Goldilocks price” halfway in between. I also presume that eMusic first selected the number of tracks for the $9.99 price point to achieve the magic figure of 25 cents per track, and then chose the number of tracks for the $14.99 and $19.99 price points to show a clear discount from the base plan. ...

I happened to read a blog post by a John Zorn fan ruminating about whether to buy albums from Zorn’s Tzadik label from eMusic or elsewhere. So he asked Tzadik for guidance: I emailed Tzadik to ask if they had a preferred way that fans buy their music. I was told their preference was “definitely the purchase through our own web site.” In regards to eMusic, I was told that they offer downloads as an “alternative.” ...