eMusic stands up for the long tail of digital music
Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory has been getting a bit of a kicking recently, with several studies – including one joint effort between the MCPS-PRS and mBlox that claimed that 80% of digital music inventory sold no copies at all during the period analysed.
eMusic has hit back, claiming that its sales data from 2008 supports the Long Tail theory. The company claims that around 75% of its tracks sold at least once during 2008. “eMusic is the Long Tail,” says European MD Madeleine Milne.
“Our customers buy music beyond the mainstream top 40 because we provide them with more context than any other major music retailer through Web 2.0 features, insightful editorial content, a passionate subscriber community and an easy-to-use and effective recommendation engine. And we reinforce the music discovery experience with subscription pricing that encourages experimentation.”
How to reconcile these two apparently contradictory claims? eMusic’s subscription model means users may be more willing to take a chance on new or obscure music. We’re going to ask the MCPS-PRS’ Will Page what his reaction is, and will provide an update then.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I don’t know if you can qualify eMusic’s subscription model as a long tail business. It is misleading to say that they 75% of it’s tracks “sold”, since the store is like a pay-one-price all you can eat buffet. In many of the long tail examples, the product was priced uniformly across the tail which is actually more like the MCPS-PRS/mBox store. This seems to be a case against the long tail, but I am skeptical of the results.
If eMusic was varying their pricing dynamically with demand to maintain the low opportunity cost for consumers to experience new and/or obscure music, they would be doing more to leverage the long tail (someone please correct me if this is wrong). I commend eMusic’s web 2.0 features that create “filters” (a main component of long tail businesses) with editorial content and some sort of community.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
[...] eMusic stands up for the long tail of digital music January 15, 2009 [...]
April 17th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
[...] eMusic, they recently stated that all the community services and tools are great, but ”we reinforce the music discovery experience with subscription pricing that encourages [...]