PLUS COMMENTARY
We wrote about it last week, but now it's official eMusic is making some major additions and changes to its web site including:
A redesigned album page - Subscribers will not only see the standard info on the album page. They'll also find imported content from YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia.- Customers can share their finds outside the eMusic community. - They can bookmark the album page or send it to their social network feed on 18 osocial media sites,including Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Stumble Upon and with more to be added.
Never one to hold back, eMusic's CEO David Pakman states, “Stores like iTunes, Amazon and even the new Rhapsody are missing the boat...
...Blogs and recommendations from friends are now more relevant in music discovery than what music critics have to say, but what’s missing is a place that brings that all together. eMusic is that place. This is the first of six months of dramatic product improvements which we believe will set the bar for the way “long tail” retailers -- and indeed all entertainment retailers - must function online.”
Each month through the end of the year, eMusic says it will launch "dramatic new features" that "focus on delivering relevant musical context from the web to enhance the discovery experience". These will include a new home page, a third generation recommendation engine, new search and browse functionality and new artist and audio book pages.
COMMENTARY: Somehow I doubt Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are shaking in their boots.
Theses changes, while smart, are evolutionary not revolutionary, as Pakman would have us believe. Bringing in content from across the web may be nice, but will offer little that any fan can't find after a quick Google search and a few mouse clicks. In a world where anyone can learn anything almost instantly, it may be smarter to under promise and over deliver rather than the opposite.
