I pay about $20 for a monthly allotment of indie MP3s from eMusic, and have for years. I appreciate the flat rate and the flexibility of DRM-free downloads. But the company hasn’t done much for me lately; this summer it added<\/a> Sony back-catalog content while making member plans more expensive and less generous.<\/p>\n eMusic and its owner JDS Capital Management, facing slow growth and seeing the acquisition of competitors like Lala<\/a>, are looking to sell to someone like Best Buy or Rhapsody (aka RealNetworks) and\/or introduce streaming music to jump-start growth, The New York Post today reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n Streaming is not a bad way to go in this day and age. But eMusic’s library, even if it can close additional major label back-catalog deals, wouldn’t be able to compete with more complete streaming offerings like Rhapsody. Still, eMusic already has something like 400,000 paying subscribers and $65-70 million in annual revenue — nothing to sneeze at. And if those other 399,999 users are anything like me, we’d appreciate more functionality, not less.<\/p>\n Perhaps a better acquirer or merger candidate would be Spotify, the European darling<\/a> that would really love to have an American business. Spotify also employs a flat-rate model, though it doesn’t do downloads. Sure, it’d have to raise some money to make it happen, but everyone would benefit from the deal, users included.<\/p>\n
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