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.” ...

In my original post on eMusic Europe I noted that the prices for the Basic plan in Europe increased significantly more versus the US price than the corresponding prices for the Plus and Premium plans: the Basic plan price for eMusic Europe (excluding VAT) was 42% higher than the US price, while the Plus and Premium prices were 24% and 23% higher respectively. The price differential for eMusic UK was even higher: 46% higher for the eMusic UK Basic plan (excluding VAT) vs. 30% and 22% higher for Plus and Premium respectively. ...

Thanks to the persistence of dhaith we now have more definitive information on how eMusic will be handling existing UK and Europe subscribers on the annual and 2-year price plans. According to dhaith, “Keeping your annual subscription at the orginal US rates is not an option for European customers according to eMusic Customer Support.” Instead when their current subscriptions expire existing UK and European subscribers on annual and 2-year plans are being offered the option to be converted into monthly subscribers to eMusic UK and eMusic Europe respectively at a plan level of their choice (i.e., Basic, Plus, or Premium) with a discounted monthly price for the plan equal to the current US monthly price plus VAT. ...

Press articles on the launch of eMusic UK are starting to appear; representative articles can be found in The Register and MacWorld UK, with other outlets like Digital Music News repeating the story. However it’s worth noting that eMusic has not yet issued an official press release to announce the new services (nothing in the eMusic “press room”, and nothing elsewhere I can find), and the stories in question don’t include any official comments from eMusic representatives. (Also, the stories don’t mention the launch of eMusic Europe at all; of course, the articles in question are from UK publications who may take a parochial view of matters.) ...

This is a followup to my previous post on eMusic’s new prices. In this post I provide the equivalent per-track prices for all products offered in the US, the UK, and the rest of Europe. Although I didn’t note it in the original post, I obtained the underlying plan prices for the US from the description of eMusic’s plans linked to from section 6.1 of the eMusic.com Subscription Agreement; poppi and xtrev provided the corresponding prices for eMusic UK and eMusic Europe from the equivalent list for those services. Those lists are the closest things eMusic has to an official published price list; it apparently includes only plans offered to new subscribers, and does not include any special discounts that might be offered to existing subscribers. ...

Thanks to poppi and xtrev I now have a complete set of eMusic prices for the UK and the rest of Europe as they would apply to new subscribers. (Recall that current subscribers were offered the opportunity to continue at current US prices plus 17.5% Value Added Tax. I’m not yet clear on how that offer actually translates into practice, so I’ll defer discussing it until a later post.) The first table shows prices for all eMusic products in the UK (priced in pounds), together with comparisons with current eMusic US prices; the exchange rate used is 1.90530 dollars per pound, the average interbank rate for August 10, 2006: ...