emusic exclusive tune from Mr. Beast

[stewrat]

Has anyone heard "1% of Monster". I just found it right after I used my last download this month.

Are there other emusic exclusive Matador songs????

[johansen smith]

1% of Monster is a b-side from the UK single for Friend of the Night

[adam]

good catch - we should have posted something, but "1% of Monster" is the first exclusive we've ever done with emusic. it will be exclusive for 3 months. we're liking emusic a lot and they're being super good to us.

[Lukas]

I read somewhere that it is the "indie alternative" to itunes.

This is generation@ signing off, Later days

[stewrat]

so I thought emusic was amazing for the first two weeks. Since I am compelled to by all my matador stuff on vinyl or cd, I won't go the emusic route for that stuff. I've already run out of other interesting stuff.

[tinobeat]

I liked emusic a lot while I was a subscriber, but I think they need to make the switch to per-song payment, rather than subscriptions. $20/month for 90 tracks is the kind of pricing I'd love to see become the standard. It takes into account that ZERO manufacturing costs are incurred by mp3s, as opposed to charging close to what it costs for a real CD for files. And lets not begin on the DRM bullshit that's riddling those iTunes files. I mean, for $10 I can get an album from there and be restricted. for a few dollars more, I can buy the CD and have a copy on my computer with full Fair Use capabilities, *and* an uncompressed, lossless (as lossless as digital gets, at least) copy for my stereo, which would rather not play CDs burned from compressed files.

if emusic just set up a thing where it was just like iTunes but they charged, say, 30 cents per song (which is what they basically do already, but as a subscription) rather than 99 cents, their business would go through the roof, and redefine the market in more realistic terms. Now, I don't know what kind of cuts labels get from emusic vs. itunes, but I have a feeling if emusic started selling tons more mp3s with the lower price, it would even out.

[bitterfruit]

I changed my tune about emusic after I really spent some time thinking about how evil DRM really is. I just wish emusic would implement rollover credits.

[tinobeat]

that's exactly it. you pay $20 for 90 downloads (if you're all "premium" like I was), but 90 is a strangely arbitrary number, and I started to count tracklists on albums to see exactly what I could do. At that rate, its 22 cents a track (length not an issue, unlike iTunes, which won;t let you buy individual tracks over a certain length), which is about right by me, so if they just readjusted the method by a hair, it'd be miraculous. Shit, I'd even consider licensing stuff I release through that medium then.

Now, if you really wanna get all DRM on that shit, that's totally fine. But sell the inferior (by way of DRM restrictions) files for a quarter a piece, and then its worth it. you're spending less for getting less. And lets face it, DRM AAC's are definitely "getting less". But if you charge less, then who cares? I mean, yeah, if you have the means, you can get DRM-free files for zero cents apiece, but the iTunes store model has shown that people are more than happy to pay for DRM files. So what someone (preferably eMusic, in the indie realm) could/should do is blow that shit WIDE open by charging a third for the product, and I guarantee sales would go blow up. The labels/artist would get the same as they would have before (since they're not spending a dime on reproduction, and assuming sales are much higher), and more people would have the restricted files. unscrupulous motherfuckers (like me, I guess, but I also support artists by spending assloads on actual product) will always download for free, but the pay-per-download market has been clearly established. Why not actually introduce price-based competition, rather than just accepting Steve Jobs' initial idea of a dollar a song as the only truth? I'm telling you, the market would respond and actually change with something like that. And I think eMusic, especially with its really aggressive new ad campaign, could be the company to do it, and I wish they would.

[Tony]

Your ideas scare me. I think most people don't care about DRM (who has more than 5 or whatever computers they want to play their songs on?) and are perfectly OK with lossy files. $3.60 for 12 songs vs. $12 for a record is too much of a no-brainer, and as a CD/vinyl buyer, I would rather not see my local record stores go out of business. I agree that the 99-cent iTunes pricing is too high, and isn't much of a discount considering you're getting less, but there's a big middle ground there.

[Patrick]

The only issue is that reproduction and manufacturing are a drop in the ocean of what it costs to produce music. What you really have to look at are:

recording costs
artwork design
marketing
mechanical (publishing) royalties
artist royalties
distribution fee (Emusic or whoever's cut)
overheads (staff salaries, office space, computers to get all of the above done)

and finally

the "hit factor" - this affects indies as well as majors, just not as badly. Basically, nobody really can predict very well just how a record will perform. You can guess, and some people are better than others, but every band is different from every other band - and some turn in records that reflect how good they are, and others don't, and some do some of the time. Even when that happens, the marketplace may have totally transformed by the time the record is released, or by the time the 5th record is released.

If the label is doing their job, then they can ameliorate much of the "hit factor" problem. But sometimes it's just in the hands of the consumers and the marketplace, and sometimes people don't like a record. Sometimes it's just bad luck - Techno Animal's 'Brotherhood Of the Bomb' was released the same month as the Arsonists' second album - both September, 2001. (The Arsonists actually on 9/11.)

But the problem with the "hit factor" (or maybe it should be called the "bomb factor") is that the records that don't succeed tend to drag the overall financial performance of the label down. So you need more money from the records that _do_ sell to make up for the losses.

As in any artistic or media business, every release is something of a gamble. When a record's a sure thing, you might have paid too much for it. When a record's not a sure thing, you might have paid too much to market it.

The hits support the losses... but not at 22 cents a song. (Just deduct 9.1 cents statutory mechanical from the 22 cents to start with!) And certainly not when the other factors of running a record label are taken into account (see: recording costs through overhead, above). I wish volume could make up for it, but it's extremely unlikely if you do the math.... and take into account the ever-present uncertainty. We try to predict the future, and sometimes we succeed. But often we don't.

This isn't an argument in favor of DRM. But it is an argument in favor of rational music pricing. Recording, marketing and selling music is not cheap (the recording and selling are cheaper than they once were, and the marketing is more expensive... and looking to get more and more expensive as more and more musical voices find it easier to get heard).

Patrick