eMusic Street?

Plong42

It was suggested today on Hypebot that eMusic is interested in buying AmieStreet. Is eMusic On A Buying Spree?

I am fairly certain this is a bad thing, but is it the end of the world?

cafreema

Huh. So eMusic pleading poverty may not be the whole truth.

In my mind consolidation is usually a bad thing, but in this case it would really depend on the set up. As long as eMusic kept the Amie rules as is (while adding things like Jagjaguwar to Amie) I wouldn't have a problem with it. If the two sites start getting things at different times, or something stupid like starting all Amie albums at the eMusic price starts occurring, I would be quite put out.

Craig

amclark2

I am fairly certain this is a bad thing, but is it the end of the word?

I'm trying to imagine a scenario where this escalates into the end of the world. Maybe Sony convinces emusic to get back at the Russians for all of those shady Russian download sites by offering cheap or free Russian music through Amie Street. And the mobsters who own the Russian site put pressure on the government to do something about it. So the Russian President calls up and can only get ahold of Joe Biden. Who says hell no we won't back down. Stop offering illegal American music and we'll maybe think about doing something about the Russian music. So the Russians don't want to go this fight alone, so they offload some oil wells to BP, and use it to sneakily buy 7digital and LaLa, which then start illegally offering dis-allowed American music in China, which pisses the Chinese off to no end. But the Russians use some of their super-hackers to break down the Great Cyber Wall of China, still and always under the guise of Americans, and maybe British too. So then the French see all this activity and they start trying to find some download service to buy (under the guise of Citroen), but they can't find one, so they allign with Germany (via VW) and start to design one, and Germany pulls in Japan, (via Toyota) and then the whole thing becomes so topheavy and technologically advanced that they need to design a whole new internet, but in studying the old internet they figure out the whole America-Russia-China and Great Britain thing, but they don't tell anybody, but Apple's spies inside VW find out, and they tell the Australians who are so pissed off about everybody pulling download services out of their country that they blow the lid off everybody and...

cafreema

...in the end all that is left is a solitary Slovakian sheep farmer named Pavel.

Craig

Nereffid

One or other of Sarah Palin's children fails to cancel an eMusic trial subscription in time, and Sarah starts a relentless Twitter campagin about "eMusic up there in New York, pallin' around with Sony" and "It's high time eMusic stopped thinkin' about Amie Street and started carin' about Main Street", and thus is launched her 2012 campaign. She surges to victory thanks to the votes of a hundred thousand disgruntled former eMusic subscribers. Then the end of the world is, at most, 4 years away.

kargatron

It's an interesting question. Certainly emusic couldn't consolidate catalogs and prices across the two alone, because then no one would subscribe. eMusic kicks amie's ass in catalog, I've no idea if a merger would indicate greater catalog overlap. Plenty of acquisitions end in burial of the acquired, but it doesn't strike me as likely that a separate business model would be shut down in this rather young and small field of digital music sales. It's possible that very little would change except for corporate revenue statements.

Plong42

I have never read anything about AmieStreet being in financial hot-water (unlike Jamendo, for example). eMusic sees itself as legitimate competition for iTunes, especially after the two big additions in the last year, so perhaps this is a way to absorb the competition in order to kill it.

NankerP

Well if eMu extended its "no new members outside of US/Canada/EU/UK" policy to Amie St that would be teh suck.

jonahpwll

When the entreprenuerial enthusiasm of a company's founders is replaced by a boardroom of executives who see the company as a profit center, it's usually not a good thing. I wouldn't view this emu thing as a positive development. I also wouldn't view the idea of Amie getting scooped up by a bigger fish as anything other than inevitable. I'll enjoy Amie for as long as it stays Amie.

Daniel, Esq.

Huh. So eMusic pleading poverty may not be the whole truth.

well, i recently read that, since the sony acquisition, emusic has seen its first substantial rise in the subscriber base in the past few years. the articles didn't say that emusic was poverty-stricken before the sony acquisition, just that it was in a rut. i can't see how the two services would be compatible. but who knows?