emusic eats itself
Filed Under Dale Cooper, Music, Technology
Hello to the rest of you on the Porch. This is Agent Cooper once again. I have little information on the whereabouts of the Big Dog, and what I know I am unable to share at this time, lest it compromise an ongoing investigation; but rest assured, we will try to share his words (even if they are his last words… sob!) with you by Beer Friday. Or whenever.
On to today’s topic.
I am a long-time emusic subscriber. If you’re not familiar with it, emusic is a subscription-based source of legal mp3 downloads. They are also at the center of a minor online firestorm right now, having just recently made a deal with Sony and (not coincidentally) dramatically hiked their prices. For some this represents a large improvement for emusic: even though the price-per-download and downloads-per-monthly-fee have increased and decreased respectively, being able to plunder the storied catalogs of Bruce Springsteen and Miles Davis is a huge upgrade over picking through the obscure artists that used to fill the emusic rosters. For others, it’s only about the cost: how DARE your downloads now cost roughly half as much as basically everybody else‘s downloads?
I come not to pick a side in that debate. I have the luxury of not really caring for many months to come, since my annual plan just renewed in April, and I will enjoy roughly nine more months at my old rates, while still downloading many hits of yesterday (and probably some jazz or something, I dunno). Probably the outrage or euphoria, or euphoria tempered with some outrage, will kick in around mid-March 2010.
I will say this, though: emusic has no idea what the fuck they are doing.
Every company that sells you anything does so under a Brand. Branding is a company’s way of familiarizing themselves and their products to you. When you think of McDonald’s, for example, you probably think “cheap and tasty-enough cheeseburgers that are handed to me six seconds after I pay for them.” You don’t think of adult-targeted restaurant-quality burgers, or gourmet coffee. Both of these are examples of McDonald’s stepping outside their brand – one was an infamous failure, and the other is probably soon to be a less-infamous but similarly fail-y failure. McDonald’s can get away with violating their brand because their brand is a big, heavily-reinforced umbrella – and the ribs are zillions of investor dollars and tasty cheeseburger monies. McDonald’s can occasionally crap out an Arch Deluxe-level bad idea and it doesn’t change the fact that you still go there once every couple weeks for the World’s Most Delicious Fries ™. Your mind still understands on some primitive, unconscious level what McDonald’s is.
Not so with lesser companies and niche marketeers. Which is where we return to emusic. emusic is not one of the lumbering giants of digital downloading – certainly it is no iTunes, which is the McDonald’s of the mp3 (or its closest Apple-engineered proprietary equivalent). Actually, let’s adjust this metaphor a bit and say that iTunes is Applebee’s, because that’s kind of cute, right? If iTunes is Applebee’s, emusic is closer to that kicky Vietnamese/Chinese joint in your neighborhood. Maybe it’s really good and deserving of a wider audience; maybe in fact it’s way better (and cheaper) than Applebee’s; maybe they’ve tasted a little success, and opened a couple other locations around town. Good for them. But if one morning they woke up and started selling Pizza Flamers and Sexy Appetizer Menage a Trois Samplers, they’d be out of business in a heartbeat. They can’t do what Applebee’s does and expect to compete. Even if they tried to keep selling their mi xao don or banh canh – at inflated prices of course, because Pizza Flamer raw materials are ‘spensive, man! – their old customers will stop coming around. They will be thrown by the attempt the restaurant made to redefine its brand – and as a result there really won’t be a brand any more. That’s where emusic stands today.
I became an emusic subscriber for what I assume is a pretty common reason: I thought their prices were really good and I like exploring obscure music when the price is friendly to the consumer (i.e. me). They didn’t have much major label music – no Springsteen, and also no Timberlake, Timbaland, Tim McGraw, or Admiral Tim The Most Popular Music Guy There Is. But they had most everything that had ever been released by reggae warhorse Greensleeves Records, and a whole lot of Frank Zappa. They had underground metal and electronic music. They had Conganese electrolite dancers and whatever other stuff from the sun-drenched bumpy spots on the globe. They were losing money, as it turns out, and they continually back-pedalled from awesome plans to less awesome ones: most notably, near the beginning, they went from an “unlimited downloads all the time!” model to a “holy shit, what were we thinking?? sorry guys, you get only 100,000,000 downloads per second… really, we’re VERY sorry” compromise. Prices have slowly risen, as you’d expect from a combination of inflation and a generally awkward business model that never made much economic sense to begin with. But through all of that – and also the occasional loss of a label like Rykodisc, which took their Zappa and went home – emusic remained who they were. They even say it, loud and proud, on their “About Us” page: “eMusic is the internet’s corner music store. It offers a deeper, more personal alternative to mass market digital music retailers — at better prices… eMusic recognizes that not all customers want a one-size-fits-all, mass market music experience. By using the advantages of the web and social media, eMusic recreates the benefits of the corner music store…” Blah blah blah. (They’re really hung up on that “corner music store” thing.)
But that is swiftly becoming who emusic was, not who they are. Who is emusic as of June 30 and looking out into eternity? They are a slightly bargain-priced site that can’t compete with the big boys (iTunes, Amazon, and Wal-Mart) because they are hampered by deficencies that used to be features. Casual music consumers don’t want subscription models, or to be forced to download entire albums when they just want a single (the “album only” designation is popping up on a lot of the big hit songs, as it turns out). They don’t want to be limited to Sony artists or albums that are at least two years old. They want to download what they want, when they want; they are not interested in exploration or being tied to a particular company. iTunes and Amazon and the like are already servicing their needs just fine, and they don’t spend enough on music in general to make an auxiliary membership with emusic remotely desirable. At the same time, hardcore music fans that used to make up all of emusic’s base are put off by the drastic price increases (possibly in violation of emusic’s stated membership policies) and the fact that many albums that used to be bargains because of low track count – like those one to four track ambient and jazz albums – now cost a comparatively whopping 12 “credits” to download. And of course, they aren’t too happy about “album only” downloads, either. They didn’t want to trade their quirky corner-music-store-of-the-web for a little bargain-priced Springsteen. They didn’t want cut-rate Pizza Flamers; they wanted curry noodles at the same old prices.
So emusic has taken their brand out back and roughed it up, shot it in the leg a few times, bludgeoned some of its soft bits with a brick. It remains to be seen if they can recover from this. But my guess is that they can’t – even if they do, it will be a reinvented emusic, a shadow of what they once were. If they get other big labels to sign similar deals to the Sony one, without driving up their prices any further, that might be sufficient to bring on some new subscribers, and keep enough old ones (like me). But what will those people be subscribing to?
