Music

The mainstream media is beginning to take note of eMusic. The latest sign: a favorable article in USA Today, “EMusic’s pitch: Download song-and own it.” I found the very last section of the article most interesting, describing David Pakman’s attempts to convince major labels to participate: He has a juicy pitch: Give him out-of-print material that consumers can’t get their hands on and let him promote the material heavily on eMusic, minus DRM. . . . The proposal has been accepted at all the major labels by lower-level digital executives, but gets stuck when it goes up to the executive suite, Pakman says. It’s a fun idea to consider, he says, but he assumes it will never happen. ...

My last post illustrated one way to figure out where a company like eMusic is going: look at its job listings. This post shows another way: look at press releases from its key suppliers, in this case a release from Day Software Holding AG (a Swiss vendor of content management applications), “CRX to Store, Manage and Exchange information about Artists and Records on Popular Music Site.” As it happens, this particular news doesn’t seem to have any particular implication for eMusic subscribers, except perhaps to demonstrate eMusic’s investment in creating a reliable high-volume web service. Day’s Content Repository Extreme (CRX) product is a true backend product: As explained in the CRX FAQ, its function is to present a standard interface between the underlying content repository (in eMusic’s case, where all the album and track information is stored) and the front-end content management system (which provides the actual end user interface to the eMusic content). At least in theory this will enable eMusic to change its web front-end (perhaps even migrating to a different CMS) with minimal change to the back-end. ...

As part of my day job I try to keep track of what’s happening in the various Mozilla discussion forums. Today I happened an interesting post in the mozilla.jobs forum: “XPCOM/XUL developer needed at eMusic.com (New York, Manhattan).” Based on the information in the post it appears that eMusic is looking to develop future eMusic client software based on Mozilla technologies used in the Firefox browser. My best guess is that eMusic is planning to develop a Firefox-compatible version of the eMusic toolbar for IE; such a toolbar would be developed as a Firefox extension using the technologies (XUL, XPCOM, etc.) mentioned in the job listing. (Note that an eMusic toolbar for Firefox already is available from a third party, but is not officially supported by eMusic.) A more remote possibility is that eMusic is planning to develop a standalone Mozilla-based application, e.g., a replacement for the current eMusic download manager or an eMusic equivalent to iTunes. A twist on the latter possibility is that eMusic could piggyback on the Mozilla-based Songbird media player currently in development, either adding eMusic-specific extensions to Songbird or doing an eMusic-specific version. ...

From Digital Music News comes this reminder that the music industry can likely have profits or control, but not both: Research Group Puts Price Tag on Interoperability Quagmire. Based on a report by the research group iSuppli, “The inability of several industries to resolve their differences over DRM could stunt the evolution of future digital markets, while potentially putting ‘hundreds of billions of dollars’ at risk.” Essentially attempts by record labels, equipment makers, and others to over-control consumer use of digital music, video, etc., poisons the overall market by making digital media offering much more complex and hence much less attractive. The winners in all this: companies like Apple that can potentially offer an integrated “one-stop shopping” experience. The losers: record labels, equipment makers other than Apple, the rest of us. ...

Ever since its founding eMusic has been repeatedly discovered by people who either don’t get the concept (“Hey, where’s Britney Spears?”) and/or have severe difficulty using a computer and the Internet; these people also often seem to have a fuzzy grasp on such matters as grammar and spelling. And thus on August 11, 2003 (a date which will live in infamy), after experiencing problems with downloading music mrcat first uttered those immortal words, ”E Music is SWindle.” ...