Market Shifts on Online Music
A couple of months back, I wrote about my experiment with AllofMP3.com, the slightly-dodgy-but-basically-legal Russian digital musical vendor. In particular, I was interested in how their pricing (roughly one-tenth of iTunes et al) might influence the North American market. We may now be seeing the first effects of globalization on digital music pricing.
Slashdot reports that Emusic.com has relaunched today, offering 40 songs for $9.99/month or 90 downloads for $19.99/month. The latter deal works out to $0.22 per track. That’s roughly a quarter of what you’d pay on iTunes. Because you pay per megabyte, AllofMP3′s prices vary, but I’ve probably been paying $0.10 to $0.15 a track. Here’s the eMusic catalog, which consists of about 500,000 songs but looks kind of spotty. AllofMP3 only offers 250,000, but I’ve rarely been disappointed (my musical tastes are, admittedly, pretty mainstream) and they seem to be adding 15 or 20 albums a day. The iTunes store claims over 1,000,000 songs.
Regardless, the eMusic store is definitely going to steal some business from the major players. Price is one of the few differentiators in an industry where everyone and their bull terrier are throwing their hat in the ring. Another one, at least for discerning geeks, is DRM. AllofMP3 and eMusic’s files are DRM-free, which won’t hurt sales either.
On a vaguely-related note, here’s an interesting article about the possible convergence of online music and instant messaging. Sounds pretty dubious if you ask me.
steve