who is emusic.com ?

[bitterfruit]

The same people who bring us Rolling Stone Magazine, MCA Records, Universal Music, and MP3.com also sell independent music from independent labels at fire sale prices. That's right, Vivendi music owns emusic.com.

Emusic.com has a pretty interesting history. I spent some time to do a little research into their beginnings as a company and their current intent. Why would anyone want to sell music at such cut-rate prices? It's easy to understand why someone would buy it so cheap. They don't really need to make money on emusic.com is the thing. They are owned by a company worth 16.6 billion dollars. No typo: it's billion.

Does anyone else sense a little conflict of interest when a major label outfit wants to sell competitive independent music but at a drastically reduced price?

Funny enough, they were part of the dot com bubble at one point with a ticker symbol on the NASDAQ. It's laughable actually to look at their financial history considering the climate at the time.

[9000]

ah, emusic... they used to give away tons of schwag back in the good old goldrush days. you name it, and i probably had something engraved from those folks. maybe matador can take note here. matador stress balls would fit the times.

as for your concern about vivendi's pricing, what do you think matador could sell mp3s for directly on this here site? probably not a whole lot. i do agree that there are better alternatives though.

[Patrick]

Emusic was originally a startup called GoodNoise... anyone remember them? All the way back in '98 or '99. We were one of the first labels to talk to them, but they were pushing only exclusive deals back then and that didn't work for us.

We signed our Emusic deal much, much later -- before Vivendi bought them but, well, after they changed their name from GoodNoise to Emusic.

Publishers understand the concept of selling songs online much better than record companies do, and it was a couple of publishing company experts, the Cohn father-and-son team (who also write and update the bible on music publishing royalties and contracts) who were involved in GoodNoise's ownership early on.

Patrick

[bitterfruit]

I imagine that they probably made a pile of cash on the EMUS initial offering and the subsequent buyout by Vivendi. It's no irony that the artists that they purport to support make fractions of their earnings.