A multitude of options

HIGH NOTES

Artistes have come up with new strategies to market music online.

A couple of months ago, I faced a music dilemma. Someone from eMusic.com, the digital music subscription service, suddenly pressed the send button on an email to me saying, “Due to licencing issues, we are sorry to inform you that eMusic no longer offers service in Australia.” For almost two years I had subscribed to the service and, loyalist that I was, would proudly recommend the website to anyone interested in listening to its value-for-money service and interesting catalogue (though towards the end, I was quickly losing faith in the latter attribute). But now that eMusic, the website that Rolling Stone called “the iTunes music store’s cheaper, cooler cousin”, has suddenly closed the door on me and my access to 30 songs for about $10 a month, I am left in music limbo, stuck between turning to iTunes or going back to CDs in music stores. But one being more expensive than the other, I couldn’t care less about either and, not being a fan of downloading music for free or possessing the facility to do that, I decided not to decide, and pretty much haven’t owned any new music till this morning.

 

This morning I bought new music, and it wasn’t from any of the services mentioned above. I’m going to a Fat Freddy’s Drop concert next week and thought it might be a good idea to actually hear the band’s new album before I go to the show. So I went to the band’s website in the hope that I might find an album sample on it. I did find samples, but what I also found was a link saying that I could buy the album online, either as a physical CD or as a digital album. Knowing how expensive the album would be in a music store, I quickly did a price comparison on iTunes, and found that the album was in fact cheaper to buy directly from the band’s partner web store. So I bought it.

I should have known better. When eMusic lost its right to sell me music due to licencing issues, I should have looked further than just the two most obvious places. I should have been aware that there are a multitude of new services the world over that are developing innovative strategies to bridge the gap between artistes and audiences, and address the issue of music pricing so as to offer more options to audiences.

For example, I’ve seen Topspin Media’s name come up in music news of late, due to their innovative application service that allows artistes to effectively sell music to their audiences online, through flexible pricing and release strategies. This option is gaining more currency in an environment where it is becoming increasingly clear that artistes can manage their own businesses without having to deal with one music label. Artistes now have to rely less on resorting to what might be considered risky for some Radiohead-type strategies that involve giving entire albums of music away for free. And so it seems that as more opportunities present themselves to the artiste, so do they for music audiences.