Emusic

Now that I’ve done a lengthy eMusic-related post I feel less guilty about doing yet another post on Amazon and its rumored plans to enter the digital music market; in particular I wanted to highlight two (relatively) recent articles on the topic. From the “pro” side of the fence (i.e., someone paid to have opinions and publish them) comes an article “Why Amazon is Important” by Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research. (Incidentally, Mulligan blogs a lot about digital music but has mentioned eMusic only a few times, mostly in passing.) Mulligan refers to Amazon as the “sleeping giant of the digital music market” and notes that ...

Reading a post by Clay Shirkey concerning Scott McCloud’s abandoning the use of micropayments, I (re)discovered a 10-year-old article by Nick Szabo on mental accounting costs (a topic I touched on briefly in my previous post). It’s a bit dense, but the key paragraph is worth quoting: The function of prices, from the point of view of a shopper, is to let the shopper map his personal resources (budget) to his personal values (unique and not directly observable). This mental process requires comparison of the purchase price of a good to its personal value. This entails a significant mental cost, which sets the most basic lower bounds on transaction costs. For example, comparing the personal value of a large, diverse set of low-priced goods might require a mental expenditure greater than the prices of those goods (where mental expenditure may be measurable as the opportunity costs of not engaging in mental labor for wages, or of not shopping for a fewer number of more comparable goods with lower mental accounting costs). In this case it makes sense to put the goods together into bundles with a higher price and an initutive [sic] synergy, until the mental accounting costs of shoppers are sufficiently low. ...

It’s unseemly to gloat that “I told you so,” but I’m not being paid for this gig so I’ll take my satisfaction where I can find it: According to a Digital Music News report on Amazon’s plans (free registration required), Amazon will be integrating its much-rumored digital music offering into its existing CD-centric online store: MP3s from participating artists will be blended into the larger, existing Amazon store. “They are not trying to replace iTunes, iPod, Zune, whatever,” one source said. “It’s going to look just like Amazon does today.” That means that a search for an artist will yield a number of results, including CDs, merchandise, DVDs, and MP3s if available. ...

In a previous post I offered some pretty snarky advice for indie labels complaining about eMusic per-track payouts. For this post I ’ll try to look at things in a more objective manner and consider why eMusic does business the way it does, and why eMusic’s approach is arguably better for labels than various alternatives. In particular I’ll address the business case for eMusic offering its new Connoisseur plans, since that was apparently one major bone of contention between eMusic and Victory Records. As Tony Brummel of Victory famously said with regard to the Connoisseur plans, “I just don’t believe in what they’re doing.” He may have lost his own faith in eMusic, but perhaps I can justify it to others. ...

I love that people at eMusic are posting at 17 dots; as I mentioned previously, it’s integrating eMusic itself into the eMusic user community. But. . . I do almost all my blog reading using a feed reader (NetNewsWire in my case), and it’s driving me up a wall that 17 dots doesn’t have a full text feed. Given the rate that they’re posting at, there are a lots of posts to read, and it really interrupts my flow when I see something I find interesting only to be stopped by the inevitable “(more…).” ...