Future Tense: An interview with eMusic president and CEO David Pakman

On Future Tense today (RealAudio - MP3 - iTunes) I talk with the president and CEO of eMusic, the second most popular online music store behind iTunes.

Here's a longer version (MP3) of the interview.

eMusic, of which I'm a customer, is interesting because it is the anti-iTunes. There's no Digital Rights Management (DRM). You can play the music you buy on any device and make as many copies as you want. There's lots of great music. The best album I've downloaded from eMusic: Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Second best: Belle & Sebastian's Life Pursuit. However, eMusic has nothing from the major record labels, so it's not a final destination for music.

Here are a couple of Pakman quotes from the interview:

"We wish we could sell some of the music from major labels ... We would like to carry some of the back catalog from the majors but we don't have really an interest in being another retailer that sells Beyonce or Jay-Z."

"There are two things that are wrong with DRM. One is it's anti-customer. It prevents the customer from doing something with the media they buy that they have the legal right to do ... that is, there's no law in this country preventing you from making copies of the music you lawfully have purchased, including backup copies or copying it form one device to another or leaving one copy in your car and another in your bedroom. Yet that's what DRM does ... The other thing is it creates these large ecosystems whereby you can only play music that you buy from one vendor on devices manufactured by the same vendor ... Apple iTunes has sold two billion songs, an incredible amount. But those songs will only play on Apple hardware."

"(DRM) is capping growth ... In the model where you have all these restrictions, we think you buy less music. In a model where you have no restrictions, we think you buy a lot more of it."

"(Major record labels) need to try something else. I don't know that they need to make their entire catalog DRM-free, but I would probably start with the music that's not selling anymore -- the classical, and jazz, and blues and all the back catalog stuff that's not really stocked on anyone's shelf, and I would start selling that without DRM and see what the upside is."

"I don't think Apple cares about the music industry. I think Apple cares about selling a lot of iPods and related hardware devices."