Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders

Doubling Recorded Music Sales Every Year

Podcast Audio | Posted by Phil Leigh on June 5, 2007

Summary: If you would like to learn about an online seller of recorded music that has been doubling its sales annually, this interview is for you.

Our guest today is David Pakman who is the CEO of eMusic. His company is second only to Apple’s iTunes in terms of revenues generated by digital download sales. His secret is that eMusic does not use DRMs and they offer an attractive price.
About 25% of recorded music sales are associated with independent labels that have no affiliation with the big four (Sony-BMG, Warner, EMI, and Universal). Most of the “Indies” sell music through both Apple’s iTunes and eMusic.

Interestingly, they generate about the same revenues at each store even though iTunes has about 100 times more members. That means that the eMusic customer spends considerably more money per year as compared to the iTunes member.

Length: This audio interview is about 21 minutes long.