Music

Continuing a tradition from last year, here’s what you can find on eMusic from the list of recommended 2008 recordings published by Alex Ross. (Note that CaptWhiffle also has Alex Ross picks for 2007 and 2008 as a user list on eMusic, something I didn’t notice until I’d almost finished this post.) “Crystal Tears”: songs of Dowland, Robert Johnson, Byrd, and others; Andreas Scholl, countertenor, Julian Behr, lute and Concerto di viole (Harmonia Mundi). This is 21 tracks (about half of my monthly allotment), but I like early music and the samples sound good, so this is a likely download for me. ...

On the eMusic message boards I just saw a post from rednano74 about Amazon offering “50 albums for $5”. Silly me, I thought this meant for $5 I could buy 50 albums, or $0.10 an album. This of course was just a fever dream; Amazon is simply continuing its standard practice of discounting selected MP3 albums from $9.99 to $5 or less. It’s interesting though: I looked through these 50 albums and didn’t see anything that was attractive to me at a $5 price point. This seems to be my general experience with Amazon’s discounted albums. (I subscribe to the @AmazonMP3 Twitter feed, so I see pretty much everything that appears.) When offered an essentially random collection of discounted albums, a $5, $3, or even $2 price is typically not sufficient to motivate me to purchase something I’m not already seeking out; only at the $0.99 per album level do I tend to make an impulse purchase from Amazon. ...

(In the spirit of Twitter, I’ll keep this post brief.) eMusic folks are now twittering as @17dots (but folks, register @emusic too before it’s taken) @17dots following more (94) than follow it (61), should promote on the message boards Suggest @17dots do 1-3 posts per day, highlight new arrivals, always include links @17dots “competition”: @amazonmp3 daily deals, 6,849 followers (OK but drop in bucket, Twitter over-hyped?)

I happened to get an eMusic email a few days ago (announcing new releases in the alternative/punk category) and noticed a link to a “special offer for AT&T Mobile subscribers,” with the promise that “You could win 6 months of free AT&T mobile service.” I recently became an AT&T subscriber (when I bought an iPhone), so this sounded intriguing and I clicked on the link. It turned out to be a sweepstakes tied to a trial offer for eMusic Mobile, and isn’t even applicable to me because eMusic Mobile doesn’t work with iPhones. ...

Today I got interrupted from my Swindleeeee!!!!! blogging slumber by the news that David Pakman is leaving eMusic. I have been critical of Pakman one or two times (most notably for not getting into “social software” earlier), and I have no idea how Pakman was perceived inside eMusic by its employees. However there’s no question that Pakman was a strong and consistent voice for moving the music industry past the DRM debacle, and that he had a clear (and I think mostly correct) vision of eMusic’s target market and how best to serve it; I suspect that without him eMusic would either have failed entirely or would have been acquired and then ruined by some clueless major corporation. ...

I happened to be reading Bob Lefsetz recently on the Rolling Stones moving to Universal from EMI; after a few minutes I thought to myself, “Hey, I think I know why the Stones catalog got pulled from eMusic so unexpectedly soon after its arrival.” Note that this post is 100% pure speculation; I have absolutely no inside knowledge about what actually happened. As previously noted by Yancey Strickler, eMusic did a fair amount of due diligence with both ABKCO (the company holding rights to the Stones’ older releases in the US, the only region in which the eMusic Stones releases were made available) and Universal (the major label through which ABKCO distributed those releases) in order to make sure there were no impediments to the proposed deal. However something happened between the time of the contract signing and the time the releases were pulled, something that caused either ABKCO or Universal to get cold feet and kill the deal. ...

Back in February I discussed eMusic’s failure to provide more information about the artists whose music it sells, and suggested some ways it could do better. Now Fortune reports on eMusic’s attempt to do just that. This is gratifying, to say the least (though I doubt my post had any influence on eMusic’s plans). It will be interesting to see how well the new eMusic web site features match up with my and others’ visions of what eMusic could do in this regard. In my original post I wrote that ...

Sometimes I can’t help but agree with Bob Lefsetz’s thesis that the music industry is well and truly f*cked, and this is one of those times. As every eMusic subscriber knows, not too long ago eMusic did a deal with ABKCO to sell the early Rolling Stones back catalog under standard eMusic terms (DRM-free MP3s sold at 33 cents per track or even less depending on your subscription plan). eMusic pulled out all the stops to promote the releases, eMusic subscribers were ecstatic, and by eMusic’s account the folks at ABKCO and Universal Music Group (ABKCO’s distributor) were “incredibly impressed” by the amount of business generated—business that was likely almost pure profit from the point of view of ABKCO, UMG, and everyone else involved, and that almost certainly wouldn’t have been generated under the standard iTunes 99 cents per track model. (As I and others have noted many times, eMusic caters to dedicated music listeners who spend a lot of money on music and prefer paid downloads over P2P, but are very price-sensitive.) I’m by no means a Stones fan, but even I took advantage of the opportunity and purchased Let It Bleed and Beggars Banquet (the full albums, not just the singles). ...

I don’t have time to follow every little bit of eMusic news, but I do find it interesting to look at eMusic’s press releases from time to time. One that recently caught my attention reports the hiring of Kip Morgan and Anna Punsal as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Vice President of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) respectively. There are at least two interesting aspects here. The first is that this is a sign of where eMusic finds itself now that the rumored Amazon deal has fallen through (if it ever existed in the first place) and no new buyers appear to be showing up (at least if published rumors are any indication). As I’ve written multiple times, eMusic is not a Web 2.0 darling that can sell itself at an inflated valuation based on hype and promise; it’s a pretty conventional online service with a straightforward business model and a valuation that can be reasonably well estimated based on its financial results. (In fact, if I ever have the time I might take a shot at doing this myself; the result would likely be off by almost an order of magnitude, but the process itself might be interesting and educational, for myself if no one else.) ...

My last post on “indie classical” artists attracted a comment from Yancey Strickler of eMusic, to which I responded with a list of some of the composers and performers I’ve been listening to lately. Among those, one worth highlighting is the NOW Ensemble, whose album NOW was recently released by New Amsterdam Records. Since I’m a lousy music critic I’ll spare you any critic-speak except to say that I liked the album quite well, and the NOW Ensemble web site has streams of all the tracks if you’d like to sample it yourself. ...