eMusic Swims Against The Single Track Tidal Wave
eMusic is reporting that full album downloads accounted for 72% of the subscription download site's sales last year. eMusic users "have consistently purchased more complete albums than individual tracks for the last several years, with full albums accounting for an average of about 69% of total sales worldwide since 2006."
The figures run counter to iTunes and most SoundScan data which shows a rpaidly growing trend towards individual track purchase over full albums.
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Maybe I’m being a bit snobby (as a longtime eMusic fan), but my theory: the average iTunes shopper likes music; the average eMusic subscriber cares about music.
This is very contradicting; one set of experts claimed that the music industry was moving toward the single song download trend, and now another set of experts is claiming the opposite. Who should we believe?
Neil got to the heart of it, I think, but as I am prone to do, I will say it again in more words. But just as snobbish. 🙂
Traditionally, the Big Music Business was built on the idea that you get a hit single or two out there — on the radio, on the TV, now on the viral YouTube video — and this motivates people to pay for something. In the old days people would pay for an entire album and be satisfied with most of it, but sometime in the new era, customers started to find the non-hit songs on albums to be less worthwhile, and cherry-picking became the norm for a large group of listeners. Maybe mixtape culture fed into this.
For the indie musicians who make up much of the eMusic supply base, there are no radio hits, there usually are no viral YouTube videos with massive viewerships. The indie musician will offer a different value proposition: “Come with me on a journey for an hour, I’ll make it worth your while.” Certainly this is what happens in my fave fields: classical, jazz, traditional folk, world music. Artists in these fields are still expected to come to market with about 60 minutes of polished, quality material — enough to fill a good live set in a small venue.
The big major label pop stars used to offer this value proposition as well – think the Beatles, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zep, Elvis Costello, R.E.M., U2, etc.
Now, not so much. I think it was Robert Fripp who pointed out that the era where the best pop music was also the most popular music ended some time ago.
We may be seeing a widening of the division between, in Neil’s words, those who “like music” and those who “care about music.” We might be building separate retail structures to cater to those different points of view. Lefsetz gets to this a lot when he asks newbie performers: do you want to grab for the brass ring, or do you want to have an enduring career? These now seem to be two different paths.
But hey, I’m nothing if not a music snob, and on top of that I’m an aging music snob.
D’oh! I got so wrapped up in the romance of the artist and the journey that I forgot the cold logic of pricing.
(1) Prior to the summer 2009 price increase, most users paid about 25 cents per track on eMusic, about USD $4 per album. So, eMusic customers could buy a complete album for the cost of 4 cherry-picked songs on iTunes.
(2) The eMusic “subscription” model encourages album shopping. My three eMusic-y friends were all signed up for the plan which charged USD $20 per month for 75 download credits. They were going to pay for those 75 credits whether they downloaded the songs or not.
Now, cherrypicking 75 different songs each month is a real challenge, and a real time sink. Much easier to grab five albums with those 75 tracks, stuff them in the MP3 player, and be done with music shopping until next month. That’s the behavior I generally saw from my friends.
It will be interesting to see what happens now that eMusic has nearly doubled its per-track price. One of my three friends has already stormed out, leaving behind loud complaints on the eMusic blog, and a second is threatening to quit.
It would be interesting to see similar data from the Rhapsody all-you-can-rent plan. In the Rhapsody model, unless you are grabbing a radio hit you know, you might as well take an entire album and delete the stuff you don’t like later.
Unfortunately emusic seems to have responded to this data by thwarting the single-track downloaders–when I logged in this month I discovered that a number of tracks in my classical music target were “album only”, meaning you had to download the entire “album” for a flat cost of 12 “credits” (even if the album has only 4 tracks[!]).
So emusic is reverting back towards the old model of music sales, where one must purchase an entire album at a set cost. Though this might be advantageous to emusic in the short term, I see it as a very backwards model in the longterm, and counter to prevailing cultural shifts.