Music

As chance would have it, I was inspired recently to try to start blogging again about eMusic, after a few months during which I was busy with other things and just didn’t feel the urge to expound on things eMusic-related. Appropriately enough, this post is about how eMusic can bring a little excitement back into our relationship. As a download (as opposed to streaming) subscription service eMusic relies on the fact that a lot of subscribers aren’t necessarily that active in using the service: They don’t use their full download quotas, which raises eMusic’s revenue and profit per track and in essence subsidizes eMusic’s low prices for everyone else. At the extreme end of the spectrum eMusic no doubt has subscribers who (for whatever reason) don’t download anything at all, but just let eMusic continue to bill their credit card. Wouldn’t it be great for eMusic’s business model if everyone did that? ...

When I last commented on the subject of Amazon.com and digital music I had some rather scathing things to say"). Now, according to a Hypebot article Amazon is rumored to be rethinking its former idea of setting up yet another DRM-hobbled would-be competitor to the iTunes Store, and considering selling DRM-free MP3 tracks under a variable pricing model. Assuming that the rumors are true (not always a safe assumption), what conclusions can we draw from this? ...

How come I didn’t know about this before? Jon Strunk, a product manager at eMusic, not only has a blog (is he the only person at eMusic with one?), he’s also been doing some interesting (albeit unofficial) projects mashing eMusic up with other music-related services. His latest post is on mashing up eMusic and Pandora and is well worth checking out; as you play tracks in Pandora it displays eMusic content related to the track and/or the artist, including a link to download the track if you’d like. (Based on the “Radio” listing in the mashup, a mashup of eMusic and Last.fm is also potentially in our future. I’m looking forward to it.) ...

Here’s a weird one, perhaps even weirder than the eMusic deal with Westin Hotels: “Johnny Rockets Expands Music Initiative with Local Market Campaign.” For those who aren’t familiar with it, Johnny Rockets is a faux-retro hamburger chain, and now an eMusic business partner: Johnny Rockets will be expanding its branded music to bring the classic Johnny Rockets music experience to consumers and music fans in new ways. ...

My apologies for not posting in recent days; work has taken precedence. Here are two quick items to help fill the void for now: First, Pioneers of the Inevitable, the folks behind the open source media player Songbird, have just gotten $1M in venture funding. They’re also about to release version 0.2, but you knew that already, right? Second, since this is Swindleeeee!!!!! we have to have an eMusic tie-in, and fortunately Erik Staats came through for us, announcing his new eMusic extension for Songbird. The extension eliminates the most annoying (at least to me) feature of the eMusic web site, namely that listening to the 30-second track samples requires launching an external application (in my case iTunes for OS X). The extension still has a few rough spots (as noted in my posts to the eMusic message board thread linked to earlier), but it’s definitely full of promise. ...