Ergo, eMusic did a deal for music from Sony’s catalog, like Bob Dylan. To do it they needed to raise prices substantially.

But eMusic’s longtime subscribers were evidentally able to get by without Sony’s catalog, and were customers on the basis of lower prices.

The new prices are about double the old ones. The new catalog is shallower, not deeper, so it doesn’t serve the needs of this user base. Higher prices, lower quality.

You see where I’m going with this. Good luck and god speed to you, eMusic. May the road rise with you and the wind be at your back. See ya wouldn’t wanna be ya. Git along little dogie.

But here’s what I’m wondering: who’s going to serve us niche buyers? Is there really no business here? Because I personally wanted more hopelessly obscure electronica, comedy proto-funk, and barely audible wax cylinders, and I can’t be the only one. So whose customer are we now?

And I don’t mean which baby business is willing to take our money until it grows up. Our money’s green as anybody’s — who want it?

There’s a tension between profitability and scale. With niche customers you can earn more per customer but less overall, because there are fewer customers… So don’t talk to me about long tail music, because it’s really a different kind of business than short head music. It’s not selling more of less. It’s a different kind of product with higher margins but lower volume.

It’s nice looking.

If you click around for a page that lets you buy something, here’s what you get:

It looks like a scuzzy back hall that nobody goes to, doesn’t it?

Hit one of those Add To Cart buttons and here’s what you get:

Huh?

It’s like shopping at Prada and finding the checkout counter is in the bathroom. But nothing unusual there — the purchasing experience is often the weakest part of music on the web.

P.S.: That Pay Pal screenshot is a data URI embedded via data URI kitchen. It’s more convenient to do that than to upload a file to my web server. If it doesn’t work for you, can you leave a comment saying what browser you use? I wouldn’t do this on a commercial site, but this is a blog…

He personified big budget mega stars. The musical world that he dominated so utterly was disappearing before his eyes. The new one demands warmer and more intimate personas, the opposite of his grandiose narcissism:

He was a joke.

He was a sentimental fraud. Songs like “We Are the World” are terrible rock bottom drech. You cannot suck worse.

At the end he was not as rich as he used to be.

He personified self-loathing.

But he was an untouchable musician. The guy could play.

the new release is (going to be) all about how the music appears on / across the web.

The files and discs are almost irrelevant—definitely secondary. They do need to exist, but, really, once they are published, anyone can get them anywhere. But, the player / interface is primary, because it’s actually about that “content” that is the music—about getting into that music.

musician’s new music + record label’s new player = a new release

the player itself is the new format for music. And, rather than it being a single / fixed format, it is instead of the web (e.g., like a website—it is a web page or website). Each player can be distinctive in design, but all players will have at least a few common, idiomatic, elements that make it similar to other players. They marry idioms of the web with idioms of the music player—both provide nearly unlimited opportunities for design—for being turned into products.

You’ll know it’s a music player when you see it (e.g., maybe it has something to click to make it play), but the player format can be totally free to be any kind of web page(s), which can have original and distinctive shapes, structures, semantics, contexts, interactions, looks, feels, etc. The web page is the new shiny disc.

I recommend Creative Commons to almost everyone I meet and actively discourage people from creating their own licenses.

However, this doesn’t mean that CC is for everyone. Not everyone who posts their work online is a good candidate for CC nor should they use it. Not only can it hurt your livelihood, but using it incorrectly might also damage the Creative Commons cause by letting people walk away with an unwarranted negative impression of the licenses.

This is why, before putting the CC logo on your site and announcing your new terms, it is important to take a minute and ask yourself if it is really right for you.

Having the skill to use open licensing effectively is a big part of succeeding. Different licenses have different impacts. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish and what the market wants, your choice of license can sink your project or help it take off.

The Wax MP3 player is a common codebase for semi-customized music players. The first one of these projects was Fresh Hot Radio, a curated set of links to net-born electronic music under a libre or feels-free license. That came out back in March.

The new project presents the Magnatune label’s existing catalog in a new way. Compare and contrast these two presentations of the same baroque music catalog on Magnatune.com.

The Magnatune baroque page:

The Wax MP3 page for Magnatune’s baroque music:

What’s it all about? Think of it as Ubuntu for Creative Commons music. In the same way that Ubuntu delivers user friendliness for Linux desktops, the Wax MP3 player is able to do a sleek and simple listening experience with netmusic.

I hope you dig it. If not, and if you see any bugs, send an email to email@waxmp3.com.

Magnatune founder John Buckman has a blog entry about this new Waxna Mag MP3 Tune experience. Check it out.

It’s great to work with such an enlightened music business as Magnatune. I know that’s the most obvious thing in the world if you know them, but even when you know it you don’t really know it until you get up close. This whole deal is really built on their openness and calm confidence.

While I’ve been working in this project I’ve been really getting into Magnatune’s classical catalog. AFAIK there’s nobody on the open web even close to their level. Here are my favorite “stations” on the new Wax MP3 player for Magnatune:

Baroque
Chamber Music
Choral
Classical After 1800
Harpsichord Solo
Medieval

Wax MP3 Corp. is the new company. No doubt I’ll waste buckets of electrons writing about in the long run, but for today I’ll leave it to the company home page to explain it this way:

One thing you could do with it is to distinguish spoken word from music files. A hosting service could then automatically reject music but allow talk, which would control its legal liability.

All in all it’s a radical level of power for the kind of lightweight apps that use third party web services.

One complaint so far: the web service returns XML, but the XML isn’t in a namespace. This will cause pain down the road, and it can easily be alleviated by adding an xmlns=”http://echonest” attribute to the root element.

I can only cop to retardation, though I swear Hypebot made me that way.