EMI To Launch Digital Service, Possibly While High

Dan Gibson | October 10, 2008 10:45 am

There are days when it barely seems worth reporting on the various digital plans of the major labels… we all know that most them won’t last for long, assuming the concepts come to fruition at all. Still, EMI’s idea to launch its own digital-music service is so strange and seemingly pointless, it’s worth documenting–less for the idea itself, but the grasping-at-straws nature of the business these days.

Labels haven’t traditionally done so when dabbling in their own digital-music stores (see: Pressplay), but no one has tried just throwing ideas at a wall to see what sticks yet, have they?

Music company EMI Group Ltd. is planning to launch an online music service later this year, wading into an increasingly crowded field of competitors and reviving a direct-to-consumer strategy that has historically been a loser for the major labels.

EMI’s primary goal is to gather data about customer behavior, rather than to earn money from selling music, a person familiar with the matter said….

Like the new MySpace Music, EMI’s music service is likely to combine streaming and paid downloads.

EMI executives led by digital-business head Douglas Merrill, who joined the company from Google Inc., are likely to experiment with various configurations of offerings to see how users respond.

So, the new EMI project will be at least somewhat like MySpace Music, a platform that just launched and one that EMI already participates in. You know, back when the “record store” model set in during the brick-and-mortar days, labels didn’t spend millions of dollars on initiatives to open their own stores next to Sam Goody locations in the mall. If the purpose is gathering information on consumers instead of making money, isn’t there a way to work within existing media instead of spending a ton of money on development and marketing on something people are likely to ignore?

EMI Plans to Launch Online Music Service [WSJ]