Music

Now that Amazon has opened a beta version of its MP3 store and everybody else has commented on it (see for example Hypebot’s roundup, as well as good takes from Duke Listens! and Digital Audio Insider) I wanted to revisit my earlier Amazon predictions. So without further ado here’s the scorecard: I predicted variable single track pricing from 60-75 cents for back catalog material, $1 for most material, and $2-3 for hot singles. Amazon instead seems to have opted for a standard price of $0.89, slightly undercutting the iTunes Store price for DRM-protected tracks, and significantly less than the iTunes Store price for DRM-free tracks. I predicted use of a single DRM-free format, namely MP3 at some high bit rate. This was an easy prediction, and I don’t deserve any credit for making it. I predicted that Amazon would offer variable pricing on digital albums, with album prices ranging from $2-3 at the low end to $10 at the high end, with the eventual maximum being in the $5-7 range. Amazon in fact is offering a limited form of variable pricing on digital albums, with most albums being $8.99 (again, slightly undercutting the iTunes Store) but some albums priced under $5. Note that these are true albums, not EPs; for example, Joanna Newsom’s Ys (only five songs, but they’re long ones) is sold for $9.99 at the iTunes Store but is only $4.95 at Amazon MP3. A less extreme example is the Decemberists’ The Crane Wife, a 12-song album that’s $9.99 at the iTunes Store but only $7.99 at Amazon MP3. I also predicted that Amazon would offer a discount on the digital album for people buying the corresponding CDs. This is not the case: If you want both the CD and the digital album you have to buy both separately at the standard prices. As I noted in my post offering such discounts on a regular basis would likely require changes to standard music licensing schemes, so their absence is not surprising. I predicted that Amazon would offer a sort-of-subscription plan with discounts (and/or free tracks) to people willing to commit to volume purchases. This is not part of the initial Amazon offering; Amazon has never offered this for books (to my knowledge), so it’s possible it may never be offered for digital music either. (Amazon does offer “club prices” for members of the CDNow Preferred Buyer’s Club. As I understand it, this is a function of Amazon’s having taken over operation of CDNow’s store, not an Amazon-native program.) Finally, I predicted that Amazon would leverage its existing technologies to provide two value-added services: backing up music libraries using Amazon S3, and personalized music recommendations using the Mechanical Turk service. Nothing like this is part of the initial MP3 store; in fact, Duke Listens! points out that Amazon currently doesn’t do a very good job of recommending new or future MP3 releases that might be of interest. Overall I’m a pretty poor predictor, although in my defense I was deliberately trying to be over the top a bit in terms of suggesting things Amazon might do to differentiate itself from existing services. ...

Last Sunday night I happened to be reading the eMusic message boards when I saw a [new post][new pos]") announcing the availability on eMusic of the new album [Kala][] from M.I.A. The original announcement was quickly followed by those ominous words familiar to all eMusic regulars: “get it while you can.” I followed the advice, quickly downloaded the album, and the next morning woke up to read the latest comment on the topic: “And, now it’s gone.” In this case it’s not really gone from eMusic completely, it’s just “unavailable for download in your country” (another phrase dreaded by eMusicians). ...

Reading one of Bob Lefsetz’s latest letters recently I found out about Universal’s plan to offer digital music in a DRM-free format (although not through iTunes). Lefsetz takes a somewhat jaundiced view of the situation, and in particular makes the point (which I mostly agree with) that the key issue for music buyers is price, not DRM. Hypebot takes issue with his pessimism and (among other things) sees abandonment of DRM as key to enabling more experimentation in music retailing. I agree with this too, but I also remember: Haven’t we seen an experiment like this before? ...

If anyone is still reading this blog, my apologies: I’ve been preoccupied with work and family matters and haven’t posted anything since May. In fact, things got so bad in terms of distractions that I had not one but two months in which I even neglected to use all my eMusic downloads (the horror!). I can’t promise to resume the posting frequency of certain times past, but I do have at least one or two new posts coming up in the next few days, and hope to keep additional posts coming on a semi-regular schedule. ...

From time to time I like to highlight eMusic-related business deals. Here’s a new one (not mentioned on the eMusic press release page): eMusic will be the featured music provider for Jump Music, a new service from Alltel Wireless that lets cellular subscribers download music from their PCs to their mobile phones. Alltel is the fifth-largest wireless provider in the US, and is rumored to be an candidate for acquisition either by private equity firms or by Verizon. (Both Verizon and Alltel use CDMA technology.) Although Alltel claims to have the largest wireless network in the US (based on geographic extent presumably, not on total number of subscribers) it’s not that well known because its main markets are in the “flyover states.” ...